In the Woods Somewhere
by staphylococci
Summary: After being captured almost five years ago, Max collapses in the back yard of the home she was taken from, tortured and emaciated. Together, she and the flock scramble to track down her captors and regain some sense of normalcy. Or whatever might pass as normal for six recombinant lifeforms. (Post-STWaOES) (Max/Fang) Now COMPLETE! :)
1. One

A/N: I wrote MR fic way back in 2005 (under a different name, of course), back when Heelys were still big, there were under one hundred fics on this page, and Myrah's "A Little Place Called Home" swept the first-ever Maximum Ride Fanfiction Awards. I remember seeing TAE at Walmart just after it had come out, asking my mother to buy it for me, and instantly falling in love with the characters. As I got older and the books got crappier, I stopped reading after MAX came out in 2009. About a month ago, I realized James Patterson had written FOUR MORE BOOKS. I binge read them and, overall, remain unhappy with his plot development and where the story went in the end.

I remain absolutely in love with his six main characters.

Twelve years later, I am wiser, college-educated, and probably too old to be writing fanfiction, but I have a lot of extra time on my hands, and will forever ship Fang and Max as my OTP (as well as love Iggy as the protective brother type).

This story will take place after MAX and will not include Total, Akila, or the Martinezes in the story arc. This is for a number of reasons: one being that the only thing more absurd than a talking Scottie is a talking Scottie with wings in love with an Alaskan malamute; the second being the girl Max impulsively saved from bullies in the Arizona desert happening to be her half-sister is possibly even more absurd than the aforementioned. I apologize to my Iggy/Ella fans.

I do not write in advance of posting - I write and post my chapters in real time, so you may wait longer for updates.

* * *

In the Woods Somewhere

 _What caused the wound? How large the teeth?_  
 _I saw new eyes were watching me_

 _The creature lunged, I turned and ran_  
 _To save a life I didn't have_

 _Deer in the chase, there as I flew_  
 _I forgot all prayers of joining you_

* * *

ONE 

_Run!_

In a panic, I burst through the tree line. My wings were bound tightly to my back beneath my long sleeve thermal, fifteen feet of speckled tan and white forced painfully against strained muscles by spandex. I couldn't remember the last time I had run this fast, the last time I had breathed fresh air. I was catatonic. I was on autopilot.

 _I was almost free._

A shower of gunfire screamed from behind me, and I tripped painfully over my own exhausted legs in an attempt to force myself forward, reaching fruitlessly for a speed faster than possible for even somebody two percent inhuman. I righted myself at the last moment. My heart rate had to be approaching three hundred. My chest ached as if I hadn't breathed in years. _Go, go, go!_

The forest was wide before me, a brilliant kaleidoscope of hunter green and emerald. A naïve sense of excitement burst through my veins as I took in the new landscape. I welcomed the surge of adrenaline, pouring it into my stride as my muscles warmed up from the years of agony they'd been subjected to. I had never made it this far before. _This is your chance. This is it._

More gunshots. I needed to throw them off.

Without thinking, I launched myself into the underbrush, grimacing as thorns and twigs shredded my fragile skin. I tumbled into a thick patch of pine trees, the tall, straight trunks occasionally broken up by a massive oak, branches open like arms in prayer towards the sky. I shoved myself back to my feet, ignoring the jolt of pain to my triceps and the grit of dirt in the cuts from the briars.

I stole a glance over my shoulder, strips of sweaty ash blond hair sticking to my chapped lips – a trigger squeezed, followed by a sequence of _pop-pop-pop_ s – an explosion of orange somewhere to my right –

My breath was quickening, panic rising high in my chest and grabbing at my trachea. Quick gasps wheezed from me as I continued to tear a path through the woods, moonlight blazing through the gaps in the foliage.

Behind me – how far I couldn't tell – I heard Mallory's voice ring out, deep and angry through the crisp air. " _Find her!_ " His cronies responded with more splashes of gunfire.

I could feel the anxiety forcing its way into my mind, the implication of what a failed escape could mean for my already broken self pushing dark clouds around the edges of my vision. How long had I been free for? Seconds? Minutes?

My mind was racing – their voices were fading, I was actually doing it, I was outrunning them, I was escaping – I needed to calm down, I couldn't let the thoughts in, couldn't allow the terror and panic to take over – especially not now, after busting free, after –

I barreled through another tree line, startling to a stop as I nearly pitched over the face of a cliff. My bare feet grabbed at the stone earth, sending pebbles over the edge. A body of water warred what must've been three hundred feet below.

Their voices were approaching again – my split second of hesitance had granted them another couple of yards on me – so without planning, without breathing, I backed up to the tree line and hurdled over the edge of the drop.

Idly, my mind took me back to that nightmare a million years ago, the morning that Angel was taken from the E-house and everything changed for us. This time, though, there was no snapping open of wings, no startling awake; this was reality, cold and harsh, inescapable and messy.

 _Crapcrapcrapcrap_ _—_

I pulled myself into as small of a ball as possible, willing myself away from the jagged slope of the cliff face and into the depths of the water.

After plunging into the darkness, I yanked my tight spandex thermal off. In a panic, I forced my aching wings out from behind my sports bra, nearly shrieking from the discomfort I felt at expanding them for the first time in what must've been months.

I was running on pure epinephrine and terror, but I flung myself from the water (with an incredible amount of difficulty) and streaked through the sky, covered in blood and barely clothed in the frigid atmosphere.

There isn't much that I remember about the hours after the cliff dive. Call it mutant freak instinct, call it luck, call it an act of God, whatever – but somehow, someway, my inherent sense of direction pointed me toward the home the Flock had made our own years ago in the mountains of New England.

 _This is adrenaline,_ I thought, pumping another kink out of my wings to surge a little higher in the chilly troposphere. The cool breeze through my primaries was a foreign sensation. How long had it been? I ached, I was shivering, I was terrified, and yet I was still managing to streak across the sky at a respectable speed. _How long until it wears off?_

It truly could've been one hour or four – at some point, just before the break of dawn over the horizon, I spotted the lone lightpost in the backyard. My two percent avian genes, responsible for so much pain and torture at the hands of scientists, had steered me home.

The sight of that singular light was all it took: any energy that remained in my spent body left me, and I descended sloppily to the ground. A pained shriek escaped my crumpled form – I heard the snap of bone and felt a rush of heart-stopping pain – and then my eyes were closing, erasing the image of the moonlit sky.

* * *

Fang had just felt himself slinking into the comfortable abyss of unconsciousness when he heard the scream from the backyard. He was to his feet and pounding down the long hall toward the back door before he'd even wiped the sleep from his eyes. Iggy had already streaked out the door, fresh off of work and still wearing his scrubs. Fang stole a glance to his watch. 3:45. _Nothing good happens after midnight,_ he thought tersely.

He wondered if he should turn around and wake the kids. They had gotten comfortable. It had been months – _years_ – since they'd been threatened. In fact, the flock hadn't heard so much as a peep from the School ever since they took –

Fifty yards in front of him, Iggy had dropped to his knees beside a still form on the outskirts of the yard, just beside the giant lightpost that illuminated the garden at night ( _"What if I want to make stir fry at midnight?"_ he had said). His hands fluttered over the shadow, but with a tenderness typically not reserved for Erasers, mad scientists, or cyborgs.

Fang slowed to a jog and allowed himself to shed the sense of impending doom. If Iggy wasn't concerned, neither was he. "What is it?" he called softly, squinting against the glare of the light at whatever Iggy was fretting over.

Before Fang even reached him, Iggy lifted the shape into his arms and started at a hurried pace towards the house, his face paler than Fang had ever seen it before.

"Ig...?" Fang breathed, feeling that impending doom creep back, pulsing through his blood stream with each dreadful beat of his heart.

Iggy paused beside Fang, positioning himself in the glow of the waxing gibbous to show the bloodied, ashen, and skeletal body he held tightly to his chest. Fang might not have believed it if it weren't for the fifteen feet of ivory and brown feathers hanging limply over Iggy's elbow, brushing softly against the wet grass.

The woman he loved was cradled in Iggy's arms.

Fang felt the world around him slam to a stop, the pulls of gravity cease to exist. It couldn't be. They had searched to the ends of the earth for her. They had uprooted every square inch of the universe and had called every favor to try to uncover wherever they'd locked her away. It had been four years since she'd disappeared from her bed without a sound, the only indication that she'd been taken by force the pool of blood on her down comforter. He had searched, he had scoured, he had beat his fists against trees, walls, and floors in frustration.

And then he had given up. He had mourned.

Slowly, delicately, the world began to spin again. The back door was open, Nudge's pajama-clad figure beckoning him forward with a shaking arm and throwing panicked glances toward the living room, where Iggy's form was retreating toward the sofa. "Fang!" she called, shifting her weight nervously from one long leg to the other. A note of urgency transposed her voice higher than he'd ever heard it.

 _She's alive._ The thought trickled through his brain like a marquee as he sank slowly to the dewy grass. The door slammed shut and he could hear Nudge join Iggy in the living room. He clenched fistfuls of earth in his hands, trying to ground himself and battle the nausea that rose in the back of his throat.

 _Max is alive._


	2. Two

A/N: I'm back in the fandom for five minutes and I'm _already_ screwing up my timeline. The wonderful **Lustrex** pointed out that MAX's entire plot revolves around the Martinezes. While I can always remember TFW is the one with the boat, I typically get STWaOES and MAX confused. So, I suppose, this will be post-STWaOES. Maybe we'll just call it AU. Don't worry; I'll paint a picture of where we came from and where we're going. Or I'll try, at least.

For right now: after the events of STWaOES, the Flock settled in this home, courtesy of Jeb, who gave them a lump sum of cash and promised he'd never be evil again (jury's still out on whether or not Angel had anything to do with this). They lived there for a year or so uneventfully. Max was taken, four years passed, and now we're here. This means everyone is five-ish years older than they were during STWaOES.

Lustrex also mentioned that the plot may have been seen before, which doesn't surprise me. Again – I haven't been back for long, and was gone for almost ten years, so I don't know what you crazy kids have been writing about in my absence. So there's a very good chance this will be cliche and already-done. I'm here for mindless writing and a break from the stress that is work and The Real Life; no promises of perfection here. I am an ex-perfectionist, and need to stop putting so much pressure on myself, especially when it's something as trivial as fic.

TL;DR: We'll see where we end up, shall we? Quick update because I'm hoping to gain some traction, grab a few more readers. Don't get used to it.

* * *

 _Take my heart and take my hand  
_ _Like an ocean takes the dirty sands  
_ _And heal, heal, heal._

 _Take my mind and take my pain  
_ _Like an empty bottle takes the rain  
_ _Heal, heal; hell, heal._

* * *

TWO

"Jesus, I can barely even feel anything but bone," somebody was saying, lightyears away. "She's got to be only, what, sixty pounds? Completely wasted away."

I broke through the undertow of unconsciousness. I was supine on a soft surface, a crackling noise coming from somewhere to my left. I tried to open my eyes, but couldn't force my heavy lids apart. I registered a feathery touch on my right arm, the smell of rubbing alcohol, and an overwhelming feeling of malaise. I felt like I'd been punched in the gut.

 _Oh,_ _shit._

I was back there.

With as much force as I could muster, I jerked, the gentle touch circling my right forearm and holding me in place. Feebly, I tried to fling myself to the floor, but I had little to no strength left in my battered body to fight the confines of what must've been a thick, woolen blanket covering me. I shivered so fiercely, it felt more like a convulsion. I was stuck – he was holding me down, he was _right there,_ I was back –

Something brushed my ratty hair out of my eyes and shushed me. Somebody was trying to comfort me.

"Shh, shh. Max. It's us. You're okay," murmured a familiar soprano chime, smooth like dark chocolate. Afterward came a sigh that held decades of pain and agony. I felt fingers gently scratching my skull through a mess of tangles. My body unlocked at the familiarity. "I knew she was going to freak out –"

"No shit, Nudge – "

"– you should've waited until she was more with it – "

"Look at her! When exactly do you suspect – ?"

"— oh, God, Iggy, she's going to hate us – "

"— is going to _help_ her _get_ more with it – "

"— what did they _do_ to her – "

"Nudge – "

The feathery hands became rougher, clenching for a moment on my arm as a third voice growled into the conversation.

" _Enough._ Both of you."

My brain slammed to a stop, a four-car pileup derailing my very scattered train of thought. A calloused hand grabbed my left, the scarred pad of its thumb smoothing over each of my knuckles, careful enough to avoid the cuts. The anxiousness I'd been feeling dissipated like wisps of smoke over a candle. This was familiar.

"Christ, Fang," breathed the owner of the feathery touch, relaxing for a moment before prodding at the inside of my elbow again. "A little bit of warning would've been nice."

 _Fang._

 _Fang – Iggy – Nudge –_

And, just like that, I was thrust into a half-lucid state, throwing away the wool comforter and landing on the ground with an _oof_ and a body beneath me. My eyes snapped open, wildly searching for some sort of confirmation that I wasn't hallucinating, that this was real, that I was alive.

The room was silent as I registered my surroundings. The crackling sound I'd heard was the fireplace – a log swallowed in embers popped and hissed a few feet behind me. Head to toe, my entire body was throbbing and covered in goosebumps. I was still only in my sports bra and joggers, hair long and damp in front of my face. My left wing puffed, stretching from my back massively in defense with a painful twitch. I registered an ace bandage around my chest; my right wing was bound to my back. A jolt of fright pricked at the back of my mind.

I had no idea how much time had passed since I'd collapsed in the garden. The sky was still mostly dark, but tendrils of orange had started twisting over the tree line.

I was in the dimly-lit living room. I sensed three people – two behind and one beneath me, clad in a lavender scrub set and looking up at me with a cocktail of sadness, fury, and concern behind unseeing, steel blue eyes. My knees were pinned to the hardwood laminate on either side of his bony hips and locked his wrists at his sides with a feeble attempt at a death grip. The exhaustion pounded into me like a billy club.

All six-plus feet of ginger-haired Iggy tried to force a smile to his lips, but it remained inauthentic and pained. The stark differences of his features struck me; the hard-cut lines of his face, the wide shoulders, the flexing muscles of his biceps as he decided whether or not to push back against me.

" _Hey_ , you're okay, you're okay," he murmured softly, and I was unconvinced as to whether or not it was for his benefit or mine. He paused for a moment and seemed to mull over what it was that he wanted to say next. His features lightened a fraction and genuine joy splashed briefly across his pale face as he exhaled deeply. "Holy _shit_ , am I ever glad to see you. Well, not _see_ , but – you know."

I felt the anxiety grip at my windpipe again, cold and fast, and I tried to calm my breathing before it became too ragged. I opened and closed my mouth a few times but could not force a sound from between my lips.

Iggy looked up with more tenderness than I'd ever been on the receiving end of and took a huge breath. "I'm just trying to start an IV on you," he said, voice as gentle as his fingertips had been on my elbow moments ago. My heart must've started tap dancing, because Iggy's ear twitched and a frown pulled at his dimples. "I know that's probably not the most reassuring thing to hear right now, but you need fluids. You look – " His sentence stopped and he bit his lip. "You… look like you could use some fluids."

Absently, I registered that a normal me would make some sort of snarky comment, fire off a bunch of questions, altogether refrain from looking like a total head case. The thoughts filtered in and out, but I was struggling too hard with controlling the escalating rumble of panic in my bones to do much of anything.

The skin on the back of my neck prickled and I leapt from Iggy's chest, spinning one hundred and eighty degrees on the ball of my left foot and finishing in a crouch position a couple of feet from the newest threat to my personal space. I watched her beautiful eyes go as wide as sand dollars before allowing my sore muscles to relax. _Nudge_.

I absorbed every inch of her kneeling form, this teenage version of the girl I'd help raise so many years ago. Her eleven-year-old boyish figure was no longer, her once-sticklike legs traded for long, curvy pillars, the roundness of her cheeks thinned out to reveal high cheekbones. In her striped pajama set and ponytail, she could've been a regular girl. A woman, even. She'd easily pass for twenty.

She reached out a cautious hand, trembling and begging for contact. "Max?" she whispered, and slowly, gently, I reached my own battered fingers to brush against the soft, cappuccino flesh of her palm.

The tentative air around her melted and she launched herself into my arms without pause, clearly not concerned about how borderline homicidal I must've looked. "Oh, my God, _Max_ ," she breathed, and then the tough-girl façade she'd perfected broke down into sobs in my arms. "I thought – I thought – oh, my _God_ , I thought –"

My senses were overloaded, and I was too overwhelmed to even react in a manner that would suggest I was cognizant of the moment. No brush of her hair, no voice at her ear. I simply crouched there as she clutched me, stunned, a sobbing girl – no, _woman_ – falling to pieces in my battered arms. I tried to ground myself by focusing on the flannel of her pajamas against my fingertips.

 _What have I missed?_

I stole a glance over her shoulder as she held me, my eyes trailing just behind where Iggy knelt next to the couch.

I made an odd sort of choking noise. Nudge pulled back quickly, probably fearing that she'd hurt me. She fell back to sit on her heels, taking shuddering breaths and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand before following my gaze and allowing a small smile to illuminate her stunning features.

Fang was taller than the last time I'd seen him, although still shorter and sturdier than Iggy. His hair was cropped shorter than it had ever been in our years on the run and spiked up in random directions from sleep. He raked a hand through it and let a huff of air through his nose. "Hi," he said quietly, delicately. Like he was afraid he'd break me if he moved too quickly.

Nudge rose to her feet, tugging me up to stand next to her. She, too, was taller, I noticed now, her mess of brown curls an inch or so above my 5'8" frame. Fang had at least four inches on me.

I took half a step in his direction, and that was all it took before he was enveloping me in his tan arms and crushing me against his chest. Every muscle in his body was pulled taut and I could feel him bury his face against the top of my head. I inhaled deeply and filled myself with his scent, cedar and cotton and _home_.

When he felt me melt around him, his guard went down, too. "God," he sighed, his voice striking a pitch that betrayed the stoic air he tried so hard to maintain. Some fractured part of me fused back together right there in his arms. "Max… I – " he stopped and clutched me tighter, avoiding my splinted wing. A moment passed where it was just the universe, he, and I – where nothing had happened to me, I'd never disappeared, I'd never been broken.

Sensing my body wilt against him, he guided me back toward the couch and took a seat beside me. His words finally fell out, more composed this time, back behind those tall, impenetrable walls. Iggy reclaimed my arm and prodded at it in a search for vasculature. "I thought I was never going to see you again," murmured Fang.

 _You're telling me,_ I thought mirthlessly. I still could not will my mouth to create sounds.

The smell of antiseptic flooded my nose and I yanked my right arm reflexively from Iggy, who immediately let me go and raised his hands in an innocent gesture. He dropped the alcohol pad from his hand and let it hit the ground. None of us were strangers to feeling violated, and sightless though he was, Iggy could read the five of us like a book.

"Max…" Nudge's voice was wary, and I could've sworn she was eleven years old all over again, watching as I tried to saw my arm open with a seashell on a beach. "What _happened_?"

Every single part of me reacted to the question, clamming up physically, mentally, and emotionally. I slammed my knees together, wrapped my arms in a death grip around my core, and tucked my chin to my chest. I shivered violently and begged the terror that had taken over me to fade. _This is your family. You are home. You are safe. You are –_

"Did they do something to you?" Iggy asked, trying and failing to mask rage in his voice. "Something so you can't talk? I swear to God, I'll – " he cut off abruptly when Nudge put a hand on his knee.

"Talk to us," Fang said, his deep, navy eyes warring like an ocean in a thunderstorm. His expression was more gentle and open than he ever would've allowed years ago. I wanted to curl into his side and collapse into a mess of pity and fragments of my old self.

Instead, I unfolded myself from the ball I'd created and steeled myself with a shaky breath. I shook my head a couple of times, put on my leader face, and looked up – and, upon seeing Iggy's tortured expression and Nudge's tear-filled eyes, promptly dumped my head into my palms and collapsed into tears.

* * *

Song: "Heal" by Tom Odell.

Last chapter's song / title credit: "In the Woods Somewhere" by Hozier.


	3. Three

A/N: Writing faster than I planned to. Reviews would be nice! If people aren't reading, I probably won't continue (which is fine!). So if you're interested in hearing more, let me know that you're there and reading! :)

* * *

 _I am in a room I've built myself  
Four straight walls  
One floor, one ceiling  
And day after day, I wake up feeling_

 _Potentially lovely_  
 _Perpetually human_  
 _Suspended and open_

* * *

THREE

I cried for what felt like a century.

For an instant, it was just like years ago, me dissolving into a puddle at the most embarrassing moment, Fang surrounding me with his strong, scarred arms and pulling me close to his chest. I felt the weight of my captivity roll off my shoulders in thick, agonized waves and simply deflated right there on the pilling microfiber of the couch.

Despite my critical closeness to being pulverized, I reveled in Fang's nearness, allowing my lungs to inflate with his musky scent. The couch sank on my left and I felt Nudge's timid hand on my forearm as she traced small shapes on my bruised skin. "I'm sorry," she uttered, and just like that, her weight was gone from the couch. I knew she was fighting a losing battle to stay strong for me.

The last years of my life had been plagued with scientists, experiments, and violations of my body, the oldest and "most successful" recombinant lifeform ever made at the hands of science. I had spent days pleading with some nonexistent omniscient being to spare me, to make _this_ time the new strand of virus killed me, _this_ soldier the one to deliver my fatal blow, _this_ bout of tests the one to finally push my fragile genes to splicing.

But now, against all odds, I was here—I was _home—_ in the arms of the single person I'd trusted with my life, surrounded by two more that I'd helped raise and who'd raised _me_ , with two more safe, healthy, and sleeping blissfully two stories above me.

 _What's the catch?_ I found myself thinking.

Because in my life, there never _wasn't_ one.

The more nagging question came to mind when I finally pulled myself from Fang's embrace, carefully avoiding his eyes: why was Iggy was wearing scrubs and holding a needle in his hand with a bag of fluids primed and hanging from a floor lamp just next to the coffee table?

When I'd been taken, I had been fifteen-going-on-sixteen; I had to be approaching twenty at this point. A lot had happened in that span of time. Nudge was, essentially, a supermodel; Fang had outgrown the skater boy enigma he'd adopted during prepubescence; Iggy clearly had a career in medicine.

A shiver rippled down my spine and I felt a twinge of pain in my lower back. If I felt like a stranger surrounded by the only people I'd ever considered family, what was even left for me?

Iggy must've felt the tension in the air because he smiled sadly and took my cold hand in his warm one. "Is this the part where you ask me why the blind guy is wearing scrubs and practicing venipuncture?" I felt my eyes narrow a little bit, and he grinned moronically. "You're looking at the world-famous, one-of-a-kind, first blind phlebotomist in the history of America—nay, the _universe_."

An exaggerated groan came from Nudge, who had seated herself next to where Iggy knelt in front of me on the floor. "Oh, God, not this again."

Iggy laughed. "Hey! I have to explain myself, don't I?" he reasoned, giving Nudge a playful kick to the shin with creepy accuracy. "I can't just start poking her without an explanation."

"Didn't stop you earlier," Fang mumbled.

Iggy sighed and sobered, staring sightlessly at the inside of my elbow. Rain had started falling outside, heavy droplets spattering on the living room windows. "After you… were gone, I was having a really hard time dealing," he admitted. "After being on the run for so long, having so much time to think and _remember_ left me with a lot of shit I hadn't processed, and all of that came back up after they took you."

A part of me that I hadn't felt in a long time bloomed, lurching at Iggy's confession. Throughout our childhood, we always knew that things were harder for him, although nobody would ever admit it out loud (certainly not Iggy himself). After leaving the E-shaped house, we never spent more than a few days in one place, were constantly fighting for our lives, and were subjected to horrors unparalleled even in Hollywood. Every so often I would put myself in his shoes and imagine those horrific years without my sense of sight.

"I rely so heavily on my hearing and smell that it was stupidly easy to trigger a memory or a fight response from me." His gaze drifted back into his lap, where he fiddled with a loose thread on the seam of his scrub top. The pink-purple hue of the outfit cushioned his attempt at severity.

Next to him, Nudge sighed in frustration and glared in his direction. "Are you ever going to drop this?"

Iggy looked positively miserable, anger and agony storming across his handsome features. I quirked a tired eyebrow and met Nudge's eyes.

Nudge softened. "Angel was cleaning the bathroom one morning. You know. _Really_ cleaning it. There's only two bathrooms—one shower—and five of us—well, six, but, you know, at the time… so, anyway, I heard a scream come from the bathroom, so I ran up from the kitchen and I guess a spider had climbed out of the tub and Angel obviously freaked out, but by the time I got up there Iggy was standing in the doorway, and I sort of tripped on the top stair and fell into him, and—"

"And I freaked," Iggy finished wretchedly through gritted teeth.

It was clear this conversation had been revisited several times. Nudge shoved Iggy in the shoulder and huffed another impatient breath. "He smelled the bleach, heard Angel scream, and then I came stumbling up the stairs like a newborn deer," she told me. "He's convinced it was his fault and won't let it freaking go." She swiveled her head back to Iggy, grabbing his face in her hand and forcing his blind eyes to meet her gaze. "You know, I know, _we all know_ your mind wasn't in that bathroom."

I opened my mouth to ask for the rest of the story, but ended up closing it dumbly when words wouldn't come. To my left, Fang nudged a little bit closer, his hand threading through mine. "I had been in the garden. I heard Angel scream. By the time I made it up the stairs, Iggy had Nudge pinned to the wall by the throat."

The bluntness of the sentence ricocheted off the cream-colored walls of the living room. They were completely silent. The fire popped behind us.

"Angel blames herself," said Nudge.

Fang smiled crookedly. "This big event, all caused by a spider in the drain."

Nudge giggled.

Iggy still looked unamused. "Anyway, I started doing some research, just little stuff, you know, and a lot of experts said desensitization is a really practical way to overcome phobias or traumas. It started with simple stuff – just having the smell of rubbing alcohol around, going to walk-in clinics just to see the doctors walk around in their white coats. Eventually, I started volunteering for the Red Cross at blood drives, just handing out crackers, forcing myself to be in the environment."

I swelled with pride hearing his story. He was so, so brave. I could not imagine spending a _second_ surrounded by needles, people in scrubs, bags of blood. I wanted to tell him as much, but I couldn't make myself speak.

Iggy continued. "At one point, a nurse was having a hard time finding a vein on a girl, and I told her I had a pretty good sense of touch and offered to see if I could point one out for her." He shrugged half-heartedly. "The nurse happened to work for Metro and mentioned they had a training program. Fast forward through convincing a lot of people to give me a chance, a couple of months of training, _several_ hours spent demonstrating my competency, and a few more panic attacks, and I'm a phlebotomist in the Metro ED."

Fang snorted, pulling his hand from mine and stretching his arm around my shoulders instead. "He plays it off like it isn't a big deal."

Nudge nodded her head vigorously in agreement. "I have a couple of friends from school—" _school,_ I thought wildly, "—who volunteer there. All anybody talks about is how he's the best in the entire hospital. They always call him all around the hospital when they can't get blood or IVs on people."

"Okay, okay," Iggy interjected, a deep red flush creeping up from his neck to the tips of his ears. "I guarantee any one of you could do it, too. We're all mutant freaks here. Anyway, are you going to let me do this or not?" he asked.

Fang twitched next to me. "It's not a question, really. Either you let him do it willingly or I hold you down and we duct tape the IV to your arm."

My eyes widened and I felt that familiar panic rising in the back of my throat, nausea rolling in my stomach like a tidal wave. Nudge cast him a disapproving glare. His hand fell from my shoulders to rub circles between my wings.

"Max, you're a skeleton," he reasoned quietly. "Your wing is broken, you're covered in cuts and bruises. Nobody is going to push you to talk right now. But we need to figure out where else you're hurt and what you need to keep you alive."

"Clearly wherever she came from was doing a shitty job at that," Iggy murmured angrily to Nudge.

My eyelids were drooping, and I could feel the adrenaline finally wearing off after the chaotic events of the night. I was still shivering, wearing only my sports bra and my ragged black joggers, blood caked everywhere on my body and leaves and mud twisted in my hair. I stole a glance at my hands, filthy and stinging.

Although I still hadn't spoken, Nudge was completely up to speed. "Can she at least shower first? I can help her. Then we can get her into bed and you can run the fluids while she sleeps. That way she won't feel so tied down." She bumped my knee with her foot in a comforting gesture. "A hot shower will do you a lot of good, Max."

I nodded numbly.

Fang rose beside me, helping me to my feet gingerly. My vision twisted to the right and I nearly pitched to the floor, three pairs of arms shooting out to right me before I could bury my teeth in the fireplace. "Easy," said Iggy, his magical fingers dusting over my forearm.

Fang's eyes were blazing, his usual oxford blue so formidable they were nearly black. He looked like he needed to punch something. "I really think the fluids should be the priority," he forced out.

But Nudge had already started walking me towards the staircase, patiently helping me up one step at a time.

The bathroom was small. As Nudge pushed the door open, I caught a glance of myself in an actual mirror for the first time in years, and I nearly broke my neck doing a double take. My cheeks were sunken in, my hair long and matted to my head. I had never been this skinny, not even in my sticklike days of prepuberty.

Nudge sat me on the lid of the toilet sideways, positioning herself on the lip of the tub behind me. "Let me get some of these tangles out of your hair," she said quietly, and produced a brush from the cabinet above us.

It was odd, this role reversal; I had spent so many moments of my life brushing out her knotted hair, bandaging scraped knees, trying to put the more fragile parts of her well-being ahead of the tangibles the boys so often saw as a priority. I could appreciate Fang and Iggy wanting me to get some sort of sustenance—they obviously knew I wasn't going to be able to handle enough, if anything, orally—but Nudge recognized the importance of normality, the more personal interactions that I would crave after so many years of being denied simple decency.

"There," she said softly, setting the brush on the back of the toilet.

When Nudge turned the shower on, I startled so much that I leapt to attention, slamming my hip into the corner of the sink. I cried out in a very un-leaderly manner. She whirled around, an apology already on her lips. "Sorry, sorry! I wasn't thinking. I should've told you I was going to turn it on—crap, _sorry_."

I focused on controlling my breaths as I settled back on the lid of the toilet, closing my eyes as tightly as I could manage. _Nudge,_ I reminded myself, my knee bouncing up and down nervously on the tile. _This is Nudge doing this. She is helping you. She is family._

A hand came to rest atop my bouncing kneecap. I opened my eyes and lifted my head to see Nudge. "It's just me," she said quietly. "Baby steps. Take your time."

I nodded and puffed out a breath of air. _Nudge,_ I repeated.

We sat there for a couple of minutes, me trying to keep down the bile threatening in the back of my throat, Nudge waiting patiently for me to get my act together. I liked listening to the sound of the shower; I had always found running water comforting, and it was a sound that four years of captivity hadn't ruined or replaced with nightmares.

Finally, I rose to my feet, allowing her to slip my joggers from my waist and pool them at my ankles. She left my cotton underwear on. Baby steps, she'd said.

I heard what sounded like a confused gasp from Nudge as she took in my emaciated body. I moved to step out of the pants, forgetting to brace myself against the wall, the shower rail, _something,_ and my entire visual field slid sideways and I collapsed to the floor, trying and failing to catch myself on the edge of the sink on my way down. I heard a loud _crack_ and didn't realize it must've been my head on the tile until the pain bloomed, hot and fast, at the back of my skull.

Nudge was at my side in a nanosecond, cocoa butter and lilacs, nervous gasps leaking from her nostrils. I forced my eyes open and looked at her. My joggers were in one of her hands and her eyes were locked on my underwear.

"You're bleeding," she said. I raised a hand to my head and pulled it back, expecting blood to come away on my hands, confused when it didn't. _No, I'm not,_ I thought at her uselessly.

I heard thundering footsteps in the hall and, seconds after, Fang and Iggy's voices approaching. Nudge moved quickly to switch the lock and kneel beside me just as something slammed into the door. "What's happening?" Fang demanded.

"Hang on," Nudge called back vaguely. She looked absolutely horror struck. "Max," she began, half a decibel above silent over the shriek of the shower, pausing for a long moment to meet my eyes once more. I had no idea what she wanted from me, why her eyes suddenly held so much darkness. "This isn't what I think it is, is it."

It wasn't a question.

I still had no idea what she was talking about.

Fang's voice came again, an irate, threatening rumble from the pit of his chest. "Nudge, I swear to God, I will break this door down so fucking fast."

I cleared my throat, intending to speak but still finding myself unable to.

"You're bleeding," she repeated, gesturing to my lower half. When I still looked confused, she held up my joggers, indicating to the crotch, completely saturated in bright red blood.

My heart staggered to a stop and then exploded into a panic. _Oh, no,_ I thought, and my breaths started coming quicker.

"And it doesn't look like… normal bleeding," she continued. "I can't think of any other reason why you'd be bleeding other than… and it's a lot—God, Max, we're going to have to—this is way beyond what we're able to—"

Outside, a body was slamming into the door. The wood creaked under the force of the blows. I was hyperventilating now, breaths ragged and pained. _This cannot be happening. This should not be happening._ The corners of my vision blurred and shadowed. Nudge's beautiful face danced before me.

"Guys," called Nudge. She sounded like she was underwater. "We need to get her to a hospital."

" _What?_ " came Iggy's voice in a barely recognizable octave. A louder slam into the door. A splintering noise.

"Let us in," Fang demanded harshly.

Her hand fluttered over the doorknob, waging an internal battle. "I don't know what to do."

"What do you _mean?_ " Iggy cried. "Open the fucking—"

"Shut _up!_ You're going to wake up the kids!" Nudge hissed, probably uselessly. We'd made so much noise, between the roar of the shower and my fall from grace to the tile, it was a wonder the two of them weren't on top of us already. "Her pants are off," Nudge continued nervously. My eyes fluttered shut, willing this all to be a nightmare, wishing away the agony I felt at the very core of my being.

"Her pants are—I don't care if she's spread eagle in her birthday suit!" Iggy bellowed back incredulously. "What is going _on?_ "

"She's bleeding from _down there_."

The slamming on the door stopped, the angry voices silenced; the rush of the shower beckoned me down, down, down into a darkness I was certain I'd never come back from.

The bathroom door exploded in a flurry of chipped paint and shards of mahogany, and the sound of the water faded completely.

* * *

Song: Open by Regina Spektor.

Remember to review! :)


	4. Four

A/N: A couple of comments I want to address. **Lustrex** pointed out that Fang's eyes are meant to be dark brown/almost black; I don't disagree with you, to be totally honest. But ever since I started writing fic, I always, always, always held on to the probably naïve hope that Fang's eyes were a deep, stormy blue. JP never gives us a color directly—just "dark" or equating them to black, so I've always taken a bit of artistic liberty in that respect. Strange coincidence that I happen to be a sucker for blue eyes :)

Pancakes-for-you commented that Fang seems too angry, which I can absolutely appreciate. I completely agree that he is typically painted as the strong-and-silent type, but my personal aim was to try to supplement my descriptions of how beaten down she looked with flock reactions, as well as demonstrate how Fang has matured from the emo sk8r boi of 14 to a Functioning Adult / Father Figure of almost 20. A lot has changed in Max's absence.

I love, love, love hearing your input, and of course, everybody is entitled to their opinions! Just to provide some insight into my crazy brain. So grateful for the reviews, hoping for many more to come!

* * *

 _Limbs lost to a dead weight stake_  
 _Skull cage like a prison_  
 _And he's lost faith he'll ever see again_  
 _So may he once thought of me then_

 _Underneath the skin there's a human_  
 _Buried deep within there's a human_  
 _And despite everything I'm still human_  
 _But I think I'm dying here_

* * *

FOUR

Fang stood at the base of the stairs, watching with raptor vision as Nudge guided Max's lifeless form into the bathroom and shut the door. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt this way. At one point, he'd been used to the unshakable feeling of impending doom—they had spent years of their lives with targets on their backs, unable to trust anybody but each other. After having five years to adjust to the mundane, to work, to raising the kids, to trying to be _normal,_ he wasn't quite sure how to compartmentalize anymore.

Rolling his shoulders, he returned to the living room. Iggy was stripping the couch cushions of their covers. His bag of medical supplies remained open at the side of the couch, items askew from when he'd rifled through it an hour or so before. The primed bag of saline was still hanging from the lampshade.

"How does she look?" Iggy asked quietly, his knuckles white in a death grip around one of the pillows. "Honestly. There's only so much I can get from my sense of touch. And she obviously wasn't too keen on that."

Fang took the pillow from Iggy's hand, tossing it onto the couch. He grinded his molars together, tensing the muscles of his jaw. "Stop doing that," Iggy chastised lowly.

"She looks awful." It was a whisper. Fang felt pain in his bones.

Iggy sighed, shoving the heels of his hands into his eyes. It was now almost five in the morning, the sky transitioning from total darkness to a shade of light blue. He was coming off of a twelve hour shift, overdue for a shower, and probably exhausted.

Iggy reached into his pocket and pulled out his cellphone, punching in a few numbers and pulling it to his ear.

"Once we get that IV in her, you need to sleep," Fang said, more of an order than anything. Long gone were the days that he could boss Iggy around, but it felt good to flex his testosterone a bit. "Aren't you working again today?"

Fang heard a voice pick up on the end of the phone, and Iggy gestured to himself. "Hi, this is Jeffrey Ride; I work in phlebotomy down in the emergency department. I need to call out for my shift later today."

As Iggy rattled off his employee ID number and apologized for his family emergency, Fang turned back to the couch, staring at the soiled covers Iggy had piled next to the coffee table. He gathered them into his arms and walked toward the laundry room, juxtaposed with the downstairs bathroom. The scent of copper wafted into his nose. With the amount of blood Max had lost, he doubted a transfusion would hurt her.

Iggy thanked whoever had taken his call and hung up. "You might as well take some blood from me," Fang called as he loaded the washing machine. "I'm sure she could use it."

From the living room, Iggy snorted. Fang heard the clatter of the phone dropping to the coffee table. He muttered something that sounded dangerously close to "no shit."

Fang returned to the living room to find Iggy cocking an ear toward the stairs, his face frozen only as it did when he was listening intently. The shower was running, and Fang took a step toward the landing, ready to throw himself up the stairs and into the bathroom at Iggy's first indication of trouble.

A half-smile, half-grimace came to Iggy's face. "Nothing to worry about," he reported, shrugging and kneeling to shove some of the errant supplies back into his work bag. "Even Nudge turning the shower on scared her," he said, pulling his lips into a taut line. "Still has two left feet, though. Bumped into the sink."

Every single muscle of Fang's body was terse. He felt like he hadn't relaxed a single inch of himself since hearing Max's crash landing in the backyard hours ago. He let out a low groan and collapsed onto the armchair across from the couch, propping his elbows on his knees and raking his hands through his hair.

A comfortable silence settled between the two of them. Fang knew Iggy was just as protective as he was; he could practically feel the anger rolling from his redheaded brother in waves. Iggy pulled a packet of gauze, another IV start set, and a couple of alcohol pads from his bag, settling them on the coffee table next to the supplies he'd already produced when he was trying to stick Max. "What do you think they did to her?" he asked, venom in each of his syllables.

Rolling up his sleeve, Fang flexed his arm a few times, watching as the veins popped thickly beneath his skin. He'd just sat on the arm of the couch and opened his mouth to answer when they heard the crash from the bathroom.

* * *

The door finally gave under the weight of their shoulders, the lock busting open and the door creaking off its hinges. Nudge had just narrowly missed being bludgeoned by it. Fang didn't have the awareness to care.

Max was on her back on the tile floor, wings hidden beneath her, now only in her sports bra and a pair of black underwear. Blood had begun smudging beneath her across the off-white tile. Bright red blood. Blood that had come from between her legs. Fang felt an overwhelming urge to ram his fist through the shower tile.

Iggy took a step into the room, scratching the back of his neck. "How do you know this isn't just—"

"It's not," Nudge snapped, challenging the pair of them with her eyes. "I'm a girl. And it's not."

Fang felt Iggy turn to ice next to him.

Was she even breathing? Christ, was she even _alive?_

"She needs to go to a hospital," Fang forced through clenched teeth, falling to his knees beside her and jabbing a hand to her neck. He felt his heart beating in panicked bursts. His fingers were trembling. There had to be a normal explanation for this, right? He scoured his brilliant memory for any sort of medical knowledge regarding the female reproductive system, unsurprised when he could produce nothing.

"No," Iggy responded, hovering over Fang and Nudge as they fretted over Max's collapsed form. "No, no way. Fang, she looks like she's been tortured. You can count her ribs. That and the wings, and this bleeding, and…" Iggy was shaking his head hard, as if he could remove the horrifying reality he'd just walked into.

"You guys took me to the hospital after that—"

"For the love of God, don't even try to compare this to that," Iggy lamented angrily. "If that jogger hadn't shown up and immediately called nine-one-one, we would've dealt with it."

Fang tensed, his brain chaotically searching for something to throw back at Iggy. "Ari severed a _main artery_ —"

" _Are we agreeing or disagreeing?_ You're making my point for me! She is nowhere near as critical—"

"She's alive," Nudge reported, her hand palpating for a femoral pulse. "Her pulse is strong. She's breathing. Fang, we have a second to think here—"

"I will not budge on this," Fang said dangerously, forcing his ropy arms under Max's sheet-white, unmoving form. He rose to his feet and pivoted, nearly colliding with Iggy's chest. He tried to make himself taller, more powerful; it was hard to do when he felt his heart shredding to ribbons in his chest. "We have no idea what she was subjected to before she got here, no clue what else is going on in her body right now. Get the hell out of my way."

"I've seen them call the feds in for way less than this. Hundreds of times," Iggy countered, his eyes absolutely blazing. Fang was ready to snap, the claustrophobia of this miniscule space between a rock and a hard place threatening to force the air from his lungs. "Ten minutes," Iggy said in nothing short of a beg. His eyes were wide as he searched fruitlessly for Fang's face. "Give me ten minutes to find another solution. Please. I don't want to fuck this all up when we just got her back."

After Fang, Max's loss had probably been hardest on Iggy. She'd been his eyes when they were younger, and had helped him through the nightmare of losing his sight so many years ago.

Fang felt himself being pulled in two opposite directions. Max was stable—the bleeding had stopped, as far as Nudge could tell, her pulse was strong, her breathing had not changed since they'd first brought her into the living room. She wasn't going to die on them right there. But things could change quickly.

On the other hand, he was certainly not ready to let her go at the hands of the government.

The overwhelming sense of anger he felt was a defense mechanism, he knew, to prevent the bone-crushing sadness and despair trying to force their way in. This person he'd grown up beside and loved so powerfully from a distance was reduced to a crumpled heap on their bathroom floor. He'd seen cracks in her armor; he was the only one she'd let in. But he had never seen her so completely beaten down. It gripped at the deepest part of his chest like a steel claw.

Fang met Iggy's sightless eyes and reached out a foot to tap Iggy's once. "Ten minutes," he agreed, and nudged his brother out of the way. Max still hung limply in his arms. "Meet me in my bedroom."

* * *

"You're going to see something that's going to raise a lot of questions," Iggy's voice was saying, approaching the bedroom. The sound of his bare feet treading across the hardwood was accompanied by the _slap_ of slippered feet. "I'm probably not going to be able to answer any of them."

Fang and Nudge had settled Max on top of the charcoal comforter. Fang's eyes were glued to her chest, watching with bated breath as it rose and fell with ragged inspiration. Her face had relaxed out of the contorted scowl it had taken since they'd found her in the garden. She almost looked at peace. Fang could count on one hand the number of times he'd seen her this serene, the majority of which involved mortal danger or a near-death experience.

It made him sick to his stomach.

"You're making me nervous," came a woman's scratchy voice, a hint of an east coast accent tainting her words.

"Remember how I told you I was orphaned as a baby, and I now have this crazy, melting-pot family?" A pause. "My sister just showed up in our backyard. We haven't seen her in years." Another pause. "She looks like hell. But we can't take her to the hospital."

"I'm guessing you're not going to tell me why?"

There was yet another beat of silence. They were at the bedroom door now. Fang felt his heartrate skyrocketing. Nudge fidgeted on the bed, Max's head cradled in her lap.

"Jeff…"

"Iggy," he responded softly. "My name is Iggy."

There was another moment of quiet. "What—"

"Cara." He said her name like it was an invocation. "I would never put somebody in this situation if I felt like I had another option," he said in a throaty voice. "I need you to trust that calling you was the lesser of two evils."

The door opened, revealing a slender young woman just barely taller than five feet. She wore sweatpants and a sweatshirt, both splattered in darker shades of grey from the rainfall outside. Her fair brown hair was stuffed underneath a baseball cap, and a backpack was slung over one shoulder.

"This is Cara, guys. She's a nurse from the ED. Cara, this is…"

"Nudge," said Nudge, offering a timid smile.

"Fang," Fang deadpanned.

Cara nodded, her sleep-reddened eyes finding Iggy's pale skin and orange hair and Nudge's dark complexion and wiry curls before finally settling on Fang's obviously Mediterranean features.

"Orphans," Iggy reminded, sensing her gaze.

A freckled hand found her mouth when she finally registered Max's collapsed, wasted figure on the bed. She sucked in a shocked breath. "Oh, shit," she breathed, lurching into the bedroom to stand beside where Fang was bent over Max. She dropped her backpack to her side and tore the baseball cap from her head, curly brown tresses tumbling to her shoulders.

Fang, pessimist though he was, expected some sort of genius suggestion that would resolve all of their problems. He had a lot of faith in Iggy, and Iggy clearly trusted this woman completely. Instead, he got his own suggestion thrown back at him after she took one glance at Max's ruined joggers and underwear. One last glance to her sunken cheeks sealed the deal: "We should get her to Metro."

Fang threw his hands in the air in frustration. "Not an option," said Iggy, and the tone of his voice indicated that the conversation was over.

Cara looked torn. "Jeff—Iggy—whoever—this is _way_ beyond my scope of practice." She swallowed audibly and wet her lips with her tongue. "I mean, I did my internship in women's health in school, but—"

"Your mom was an OB/GYN before she died, wasn't she?"

"That doesn't exactly qualify me as a gynecologist! I can—I can try calling Daniel Savage, that internal medicine resident—he's taken me on a couple of dates and I'm sure he would—"

"Nobody else comes. That wasn't part of the plan," said Fang.

"But you want to take her to the hospital? Then _everybody_ will know!" Nudge cried.

Iggy approached his paling friend, grasping her freckled face in his hands. "Cara. I am telling you that I have no other options right now."

"How on earth is Metro not your first option? Look at her!" she looked at each of the members of the flock, an incredulous look on her face. "I worked today. Michelle is on tonight, Olivia is on tonight… there are people we can trust there right now. As long as she's over eighteen, she doesn't have to tell anybody anything. They won't ask questions—they have programs in place for situations exactly like this."

Fang felt his patience expire. He rocketed to his full height, cramping the bedroom further. He saw Cara's eyes widen as he reached up to tear off his sweatshirt and spread his wings as far as he could in the confines of his bedroom.

To her credit, Cara did not faint, or vomit, or fall to a crumpled heap on the floor. She opened and closed her mouth a few times before finally deciding what it was she wanted to say. "Okay, so maybe not _exactly_ like this."

* * *

Song: "Human" by Daughter.

Review!


	5. Five

A/N: The lack of reviews pains me! Please, let me know that you're reading. I'm ahead of myself and do have the next few chapters written already, but I work lots of long hours for the next five days, so I'm trying to pace myself until I have time to sit and write again. However, a good number of thoughtful reviews could persuade me otherwise…

* * *

 _Don't talk, don't say a thing  
Because your eyes they tell me more than your words  
Don't go, don't leave me now  
Because they say the best way out is through_

 _And I am short on words knowing what's occurred  
She begins to leave because of me  
Her bag is now much heavier, I wish that I could carry her  
But this is our ungodly hour_

* * *

FIVE

"Okay," Cara said, taking a deep breath. It looked like she was trying grasp on to some sort of tangible reality. Fang half expected her to pinch herself to determine whether or not this was some horrific, twisted nightmare. She gathered her unruly hair to the top of her hair and secured it into a bun. "So Metro is out of the question, then." She looked questioningly at Iggy. "Do you…?"

Iggy nodded once and pulled his scrub top off, shyly extending one ashy wing. They were even bigger than Fang's now. Fang was certain if Cara's eyes got any wider, they'd fall out of her head.

She let out another deep breath and bent at the waist to grab her backpack, dumping its contents next to Max's still form on the bed. "Need to get a quick set of vitals. Iggy, can you get me a heart rate?"

Fang's calloused hand found the inside of Max's bruised wrist. "On it," he said gruffly, counting the beats beneath his fingers.

Cara produced a thermometer from her backpack, shoving it under Max's tongue. "Ninety-eight point eight," she reported after a moment, "so at least we're normal here."

"That's not normal for us," Nudge interrupted, blanching. "That's low. Way low."

Iggy cursed, pulling his head through the hole in his scrub shirt as he wrestled it back on. "We usually run in the low hundreds." He pivoted and threw Fang's closet door open, pulling out extra blankets and draping them over Max.

"Low hundreds is _normal_ for you?"

There was a tinny _beep_ —Nudge had stuck the thermometer under her own tongue. She held up the device to Cara. "One-oh-two point two," she recited. " _That's_ normal."

"Heart rate is two hundred and ten," said Fang, tucking the blankets Iggy had produced tightly to Max's chest. He brushed strands of dirt-caked blonde hair from her eyes. "Normal," he clarified to Cara's horrified expression.

"How can you possibly maintain adequate perfusion with…?"

"Our vasculature is narrower. Our bones are hollow, so less resistance. Our hearts work harder. Can we play twenty questions later?" said Iggy from across the room.

Cara looked like she was battling impatience, but still selected her next words carefully. "Are you guys sure you shouldn't have called a veterinarian?"

Iggy appeared at Cara's side, dangling a blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope from his right hand and completely ignoring Cara's words. "I don't think any of us know what our pressures are normally, so this is probably a complete waste of time."

Cara waved off the cuff and grabbed the stethoscope, wrapping it around her neck. She pulled out a pair of gloves from her bag. "I'm going to need to examine her."

Fang clamped his teeth together, his insides twisting. He was going to find where they'd kept her and murder every last fucking one of them. "No," he said, feathers shuffling and puffing in defense. The tips of his right primaries squished against the far wall of his bedroom. Cara's eyes went wide as she appreciated the sixteen feet of inky feathers. "Final answer."

A frustrated growl shot from between Iggy's lips. "Jesus, Fang, is this your twisted way of trying to protect her? Because you're not. This is out of our hands, way over our heads. Let Cara do what she needs to do."

The logical part of Fang, the part that had spent so many years keeping the flock together, micromanaging Max's emotional instability, and rattling off valuable knowledge from the depths of his mind, recognized how overwhelmingly idiotic and controlling he was being. But the solicitous part of Fang, the part that had loved Max fiercely since he was twelve, had tucked Angel in to bed, and had taught the Gasman how to fly, could not separate itself from the threat of danger looming over their current predicament.

"I'm not leaving the room."

Nudge gently moved Max's head out of her lap, standing in a huff and marching up to Fang. She poked a manicured finger into his chest. "Listen to me," she seethed, angrier and more to the point than he'd ever seen her before. "This is what's going to happen. _You_ are going to leave the room. Because _Cara_ is going to take the rest of Max's clothes off so she can examine every inch of her. I know you love her, you'd have to be an idiot to have missed the _years_ of sexual tension between you two, but this is _not_ the time."

Fang felt his feathers expanding protectively again, felt hot blood rushing to his fists where he opened and closed them at his sides. "Do you honestly think that's what this is about?"

He would never hurt Nudge— _never—_ but if she honestly thought—

"I'll stay here," Iggy murmured to Fang. It was a feeble attempt to placate.

Nudge rounded on him, too, her voice still a dangerous hiss. "Oh, _no_ , you won't."

"I can't _see!_ " Iggy argued, throwing his hands into the air.

" _You_ will _keep your voice down_ , because I don't know about you, but _I_ don't feel like explaining this to the kids right now," Nudge continued in a threatening tone. "The two of you will _stand in the hallway_ , and you will let Cara and I handle this. Once we know what's going on and we get her _decent_ , I will let you back in. Are we clear?"

Under any other circumstances, Fang would've actually laughed. _Oh, my God, it finally happened. She has turned into Max._

Every second they spent arguing this was a moment wasted caring for Max. In reality, there was no difference to her if he were in the room with his back turned or in the hall, so Fang swallowed his dread, folded his wings into the ridges of his back, and let his shoulders slump.

Nudge softened instantly in response. "We will be as quick as possible. I know what she means to you. But she's important to all of us, and she needs to be checked out completely. This is unfamiliar territory for us."

Max may have only been three years older than Nudge, but she had still been the only mother Nudge had ever known, and it was reflected in Nudge's doubtless loyalty. The cutthroat protectiveness in Nudge's actions chipped at Fang's hardened exterior, and he nodded his head just slightly.

A huge breath of air puffed out from Nudge's mouth, deflating her entire body. "Thank you," she said. Her normally eager eyes were wilds with fear. She turned to Cara and planted her feet strongly, standing to her full almost-six-feet. "And thank you."

Cara nodded silently, still looking entirely unconvinced that she wasn't dreaming. "Ten minutes," she promised the boys, but directed her gaze somewhere deep into Fang. "I'll take care of her."

Fang cast a final look toward the bed, where Max's ashen form was buried beneath his blankets. She looked so, so small, and at the core of him, he felt a pit of terror. Something had reduced her to this. The unstoppable, infallible Maximum Ride.

* * *

After exiting the room, Fang collapsed against the wall in the hallway, lean legs stretched out in front of him. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. This was about the time the hero of the story lamented that he needed a stiff drink.

Fang was neither a drinker nor a hero.

Iggy's gentle fingers fluttered over his arm and then motioned towards his own bedroom. "Let's talk in here," he said quietly. He jerked a thumb towards the stairwell; above them was the third floor, where Angel and Gazzy's bedrooms were. "Don't want to be too loud."

Iggy opened the door to his bedroom and nearly pitched to the floor. Fang, wound tighter than a grandfather clock, snapped to attention, relaxing a fraction when he realized it was because the Gasman had been standing in the doorway, arms crossed tightly over his chest.

"Was anybody going to wake us up?" he demanded crossly. Angel was on Iggy's bed in the far corner of the room, her wings open slightly behind her. Fang reflexively clamped down as hard as he could on the walls of his mind. Angel would not get information out of him that way.

"We know she's here," said Angel. She got up from the bed and stood next to it, mimicking her brother's position. They could've passed for twins. White-blonde hair, and slight, lanky frames. Both wore navy pajamas, setting their cornflower eyes alight. "You didn't think we'd want to _see_ her?"

Iggy dropped like a stone into his desk chair with precision. His hands found his face and raked over it. "I found her in the garden after work. She looked like she was half-dead. Excuse me if it wasn't my priority to run and wake everybody up. There were more pressing issues at hand."

"Half- _dead?_ " squeaked Angel.

"Fang and Nudge just happened to be with you?" challenged Gazzy.

"Barely sleep as it is. Crash in the garden woke me up. Nudge met us down there," said Fang. He leaned heavily against Iggy's wall, letting his eyes slide shut.

" _So?_ " Gazzy said.

"So _what_?" snapped Iggy.

" _So,_ what's going on now!" exclaimed Gazzy, throwing his hands in the air. He looked absolutely irate, more so than Fang had ever seen him. "Where is she?"

"Nudge is with her in Fang's room."

"Somebody else is here," said Angel. "I can hear her thoughts. Kind of."

"One of the nurses from my work. Like I said, she looked half-dead. She needed to be checked out by somebody who knew what the hell they were doing."

"You keep saying half-dead," Angel said, her eyes as wide as saucers. "Can somebody explain?"

"Bleeding. Starving. Pale." Iggy spat the words out like they were unpure. Fang supposed they were.

There was a moment of silence during which the sun could've rose and set. Fang opened his eyes, directing his gaze to the ceiling. He traced the patterned shadows and let the sound of the rainstorm filter into his mind. "She looks like she just spent four years at the School," he said quietly.

Nudge's voice came from the hallway, low but urgent. "Guys?"

Iggy and Fang both moved quickly toward the door, turning when they realized Angel and the Gasman were following them. Fang's last comment had set their eyes wide, their stances a little less standoffish.

"No," Fang said sternly. "Non-negotiable. We can all talk once we're done in here. But you're not coming in here."

"You can't tell us what to—!"

"I can, I will, and I am," Fang said in his strongest, most intimidating no-nonsense tone. "We need to speak to Cara in private. We still don't know what's going on. Go wait in the living room. I'm not asking."

The Gasman, now thirteen years old and growing at a rate that rivaled Iggy nearly ten years ago, stood as tall as he could, his wings fluttering a bit. Fang stopped in his tracks at the sight of them: striped brown, black, and white and nearly fourteen feet across. This moody, gangly teenager now stood in the place of the cowlicked, disruptive eight-year-old he remembered so fondly.

"Guys," Nudge repeated from the hall, the urgency not gone from her voice. She pushed open Iggy's door and poked her head in, cheeks tear-stained. She sighed tiredly at the two youngest flock members. "This is _not_ a good time."

Angel glared while Gazzy snickered darkly, taking a step in her direction. He was as tall as she was now. "Oh, here we go. You've been trying to take her place ever since she disappeared. Well, guess what! I'm not a kid anymore, and _you're not Max_."

"Gaz," Iggy warned.

If his words hurt Nudge, she didn't show it. She, too, had grown so much from the days of Itex and subway tunnels and dumpster diving. Her red-rimmed coffee-ground eyes narrowed to slits. "Both of you. Downstairs. Not a discussion."

From the corner of his eye, Fang caught Angel cocking her head to the side, clearly reading something from Nudge's mind. The defensive stance she'd taken dropped instantly, her shoulders drooping. "Gazzy," she said softly, taking a step toward her brother and placing a hand on his shoulder. "Let's go wait in the living room."

That was all Fang needed to hear—he stepped away from the incoming argument between the two siblings and pounded down the hallway, throwing open his own bedroom door. Iggy was hot on his heels, Nudge a couple of paces behind them.

Fang was at the side of the bed in a second, eyes rifling down Max's unchanged form. A sheet now lay over her.

Cara sat on the edge of the bed, her hand in Max's. She looked like she'd aged a thousand years since first walking through his door. Iggy stood next to the window, blind eyes toward where the rising sun had sunken behind the storm clouds.

Cara's words came out immediately. "She's going to live."

Fang could've sang a goddamn aria, the words were such music to his ears.

"Of that I'm entirely certain. She's hemodynamically stable; we'll give her a bag or two of fluid, and I might be able to put together some sort way that we can transfuse her with some blood, just to supplement her recovery. But she's going to survive. Especially with your freaky healing that Nudge was telling me about."

Fang felt an immense feeling of relief surge through every single cell in his body. A breath he didn't know he'd been holding came rushing out of him, and he dropped to sit on the side of the bed opposite Cara. His hand found Max's hair, tugging a loose strand behind her ear. "Thank you," he said quietly. Cara nodded once.

"Everything else I'm going to say needs to be taken with a grain of salt," she continued. "Seriously. This is so far beyond what I'm able to do under my license. But I've picked up a lot of things at work, I specialized in women's health in school, and, like Iggy said, my mom was an OB. So that being said, everything that I'm seeing here—based on my assessment, her clinical picture, the bits and pieces I got from Nudge about how she's been acting and the sorts of places that you guys are familiar with… is consistent with a miscarriage."

Iggy's fist went through the window.

Cara continued to speak—phrases like "complete miscarriage" and "chemical pregnancy" and "uterine bleeding" were falling from her mouth—but Fang's brain had completely ceased to function.

He supposed that the intelligent part of him, the part that read books and understood dimensional analysis and had taught Angel cursive, had been aware that this was a possibility, and maybe a likely one. But another part of him had been in full denial, refusing to allow his mind to do basic addition and process this monumental concept.

Yet there it was. Cards on the table, full disclosure.

Science had taken their childhoods. Taken their freedom. Taken Iggy's eyesight. The years spent both locked away and on the run had taken so, so much from the six of them, but they had kept their personalities, their spirits, and their dignity. They had fought tirelessly to stay free, to keep their sense of self. They might have been experiments, violated from day one, but they were still individuals.

This, however, was a violation unlike any other. It felt like his heart had been blown to smithereens.

"How long?" Fang forced out. He gripped the edge of the bed, fighting the urge to vomit.

Cara set her lips into a thin line. "It's impossible for me to tell from assessment. My guess is very early, maybe six weeks or so, based on the quality of the bleeding and the fact that she exhibited no other physical signs of pregnancy. It could've been from stress, it could've been a problem with the developing embryo on a cellular or genetic level. These happen to perfectly healthy women all the time." She stopped and searched for more to say. "I'm so sorry."

An eerie silence filled the room, only broken by Max's soft breaths from under the sheet. Some of the color had started returning to her face. The blue that had started creeping to her lips had disappeared.

"Do you want me to continue?" Cara murmured.

"They need to hear it," came Nudge's voice, thick with tears. Fang looked up from the bed to see Iggy on the floor next to the window, Nudge on her knees beside him with a packet of gauze. Blood flowed from Iggy's knuckles. His face was completely devoid of emotion.

"I work part-time as a SANE nurse," Cara continued. "It stands for sexual assault nurse examiner. I'm on call a few nights a month to area hospitals when they get a woman who has been sexually assaulted, and there are things we look for. The markings on Max's body are consistent with repeated abuse—bruises on her hips, on her inner thighs, tears to her—"

Fang rocketed to his feet and was out the door in an instant. _F_ _ucking hell._

He did not register the Gasman and Angel leap to their feet as he came roaring down the stairs, did not hear their questioning voices as they analyzed his anguished expression. He flung open the back door and vaulted into the air.

* * *

Mt. Tom was a few miles from their backyard, a giant, jagged mountain busting up the horizon of rolling hills on either side of the valley. Just beneath the apex, there was a carved-out lip along the cliff face, invisible to the human eye, and inaccessible to even the most daring of hikers.

He came here when he needed to think. Or when he needed to pound the daylights out of a rock wall. Two birds, one stone.

By the time he heard the scuffle of sneakered feet behind him, the sun had completed its ascent into the sky (although completely covered by massive, ash-grey cumulonimbus clouds), his hands were completely covered in blood, and he was soaked to the bone from the rainfall. The flesh of his knuckles was completely pulverized.

A hand came to rest on his shoulder. Fang didn't have to look to know who it was—Iggy's flawless tracking abilities were only becoming further enhanced as he aged.

"Down, boy," said Iggy gently. He gestured for Fang to follow him to the edge of the plateau. They sat side by side, hundreds of feet in the air, two men absolutely beat to shit by the world around them. They said nothing for a while, Iggy granting Fang the silence he needed to process the twisted hell his life had just become.

Iggy was picking tiny rocks from the uneven ground and hurling them over the edge of the drop when Fang finally spoke. "Did I miss anything?" he grunted.

"Cara collected some… evidence. She's going to try to run it through the lab at work under a fake medical record number somehow, see if we can get an ID," said Iggy. "It's a time sensitive sort of thing, I guess, so it could be a dead end. But worth a shot." His thin hair had gotten long, Fang noticed; thick droplets of rainwater collected at the ends, hanging down by his ears. "She could lose her job."

"I'm glad you called her. She's a good person."

Iggy snorted, brushing his dripping hair from his eyes. "She came to our house at the ass-crack of dawn, didn't report six winged human beings to authorities, and is risking her license to help us figure out what happened to Max. Understatement of the year."

Silence settled over them again. Iggy continued flinging pebbles into the abyss.

"Had to tell the kids what happened," he said after a while. "Especially after I shattered a window and you took off like a bat out of hell. There was no way we were going to keep it from Angel. She might've already known. Nudge said she would handle it. That's what she and Cara were doing when I left. I think after that, they're going to try to wash her up and then get her into bed. I told them to put her in your room. I figured…"

Fang nodded. As much as he would've liked to try to preserve some sort of innocence in them, Angel and Gazzy had seen more in their short lives than most war vets. Fang didn't doubt that Angel had already gotten most of what she wanted to know out of Cara's unsuspecting brain.

"We're going to need to pull it together, you know," Iggy said lowly, not turning to face Fang. The wind whipped around them. "For them. For Max."

Fang set his jaw. A bolt of lightning shocked the sky over the valley. "Yeah."

"I'm shit at the emotional stuff," Iggy said gruffly. "You were always way better than I was. You know, keeping Max in check when she started to freak. Guess it comes naturally when you're head-over-heels for somebody." He wiggled his eyebrows and half a smile tugged at his lips as he elbowed Fang's hip.

Fang didn't have the energy to acknowledge Iggy's jest in the slightest. He kept his gaze on the horizon and measured his breathing. _In, out. In, out_.

"I'll tell you one thing," Iggy began, rising to his feet and reaching a hand out for Fang. Fang accepted it and Iggy hauled him up. "Those bastards had better watch their backs. Because the second I know where to find them…"

Fang wringed his hands together, forcing the joints to pop and snap beneath white-knuckle force. "Yeah," he said again, and he felt a bit of himself coming back to him as he stood and threw his wings open. "You and me both."

* * *

Song: "Ungodly Hour" by The Fray.


	6. Six

_No enemies to call my own  
No porch light on to pull me home  
And where I was was beautiful  
Because I was free_

 _Once upon another time  
Before I knew which life was mine  
Before I left the child behind me_

* * *

SIX

"I think I deserve some sort of explanation," Cara said finally, a mug of coffee between her trembling hands. She and Nudge had haphazardly bathed Max and bundled her into Fang's thickest sweatpants, a pair of Nudge's knee-high wool socks, and Iggy's most comfortable sweatshirt. Her right wing was splinted to her back again, and Cara had started running the liter bag of saline into her from where she slept like the dead on Fang's bed.

Cara was now drawing blood from Fang in a manner that was absolutely not protocol, as she had clarified at least ten times.

"The Department of Health would crucify me," she said distastefully, eyeing her jerry-rigged setup. "If you get a blood infection…"

"It'll be gone before we even know about it," Iggy waved her off.

Not looking entirely satisfied with his answer, her eyes darted between the five people in front of her before finally settling on Iggy. Iggy must've sensed her gaze and held his hands up— _don't look at me—_ and turned to Fang, hooking a thumb in his direction.

"He's the boss."

Fang glared at Iggy uselessly. "You can ask, but I'm not promising answers."

Immediately: "Can you _see?_ " she blurted at Iggy.

Iggy appeared to be startled into laughter. "What do you _mean,_ can I _see?_ "

"You're this whiz with phlebotomy, that walking cane you bring to work is nothing but a prop, you navigate the hospital like you've got some sort of weird echolocation—"

Iggy half-snorted. "I'm not freaking _Daredevil_ —"

"You and I both know that you get around way too well to be blind."

Iggy smiled sadly. "Unfortunately, having wings doesn't negate the fact that I'm blind. My other senses just compensated, and they were heightened to begin with. I can hear really well. I'm not a _dolphin_ , but sounds do sort of help make a map of what's around me."

"He still walks into walls sometimes," the Gasman offered.

Iggy jammed his elbow into the younger boy's side. "Shut it."

"Okay. Next question. Wings?"

"No," Fang cut her off simply, feeling his wings clench tighter to his back.

Cara looked incredulous. "You seriously won't even give me that one?"

"Obviously, it was something illegal," Iggy supplemented. "Can't exactly blame us for wanting to keep that one under wraps."

Cara huffed a sigh and shoved a hand to her face, scrubbing with an intensity that left her cheeks red. In the chaos, tendrils of hair had escaped from her bun, forming a messy frame around her face. "Okay," she said impatiently, eyeing Iggy. " _Iggy_?" she asked.

Fang barked a quiet laugh. What a change of pace.

Iggy smiled, his face flushing with red. "It means 'fiery one.' You know. Iggy. _Ig_ -natius. _Ig_ -nite."

Cara's face was blank. "I'm not following."

Nudge's jaw nearly hit the floor. "You mean you don't know about—"

"Okay, okay," Iggy interjected, slamming a hand over Nudge's mouth before she could continue. "I thought we were trying to _not_ get arrested here."

"Oh, please," lamented Gazzy, rolling his eyes. "Iggy's really good at blowing stuff up. You know. Bombs, dynamite and the like."

"This one's name is the fucking Gasman—" Iggy growled.

"Language!" cried Nudge, casting a glance at an eye-rolling Angel.

"—chose it himself."

"I go by strictly Gazzy now," the blonde boy muttered, fiddling with the end of his pajama shirt. "Who lets a three-year-old pick his own name?"

"Wait, you _picked your names_?"

"Veto," said Fang.

Cara looked like she was ready to wring somebody's neck. Fang was impressed with her patience. "Alright. How come you haven't seen your sister in so long? And why did she show up in your garden half-dead?"

Fang winced again at her bluntness. Nudge's hand found his knee.

"She was taken," Fang said quietly, forcing his hands into fists so tight that his knuckles paled to match the bleach white of the ceiling. "That's all you're getting."

"How does nobody know about you?"

Fang felt entirely suffocated by this conversation. But what could he say? She had come to their aid, solved the unanswerable question of _what the fuck are we going to do?_ when Max seemed to be circling the drain.

"Good question, actually," Gazzy muttered.

"Some people do. Mostly bad people," said Nudge. "It's a really, really long story. Even if Fang would let us explain—" Fang grunted in response "—it would take hours to tell it all."

"If anyone knew about us, we'd be locked back in cages," Angel said, her voice small.

Fang winced at her indirect reference to being captured, hoping it would go unnoticed. But Cara, sharp as a whip, leapt on it like a starving dog on a steak. " _Back_ in cages?"

Angel blanched. "Uh—"

"Breakfast, anybody?" Iggy interrupted loudly, rocketing off the arm chair he'd been lounging on.

"I can mix the pancake batter!" Gazzy said suddenly.

"Do we have juice?" Angel said.

The four of them hurried sloppily out of the room. Fang, still prone on the couch with a bag of blood draining from his arm, cast a sideways glance at Cara, shrugging one shoulder half-heartedly. "Like I said—no promises."

* * *

Ever been run over by a tractor trailer? No? Me neither. But I imagine it feels something like how I did when I woke up.

A groan escaped my lips before I could stop it and I froze, realizing that I wasn't alone in the room. _Breathe. Inventory. Where are you?_

Charcoal bedspread. Navy blue walls. Black curtains. A chair next to the bed with a shape in it—a tall, sleeping shape draped over the side of the bed, its head cushioned by long, ropy arms—

"Fang," I breathed, and then quickly brought a hand to my mouth. He didn't stir, a testament to how absolutely exhausted he must've been. The panic that had gripped my body melted away.

I surveyed my body briefly. Pounding headache. Mouth so dry that it was sticking to itself. Right wing still splinted, but feeling less broken. A bandage over the inside of my right elbow—maybe an old IV site?—various gauze pads taped to lacerated parts of my body. A sweatshirt that smelled like Iggy, and tall, fuzzy socks that could only belong to Nudge.

Physically, I was an absolute mess. Mentally, I felt much more like myself. The issue was, I was having a difficult time remembering anything after Nudge asking me if I wanted to shower.

My hair was in that sort of half-damp limbo that happened when I showered and went to bed immediately after. I was dirt-free, smelled like lavender body soap, and had new bandages. My entire body felt like it had put through a food processor. Fang's bedclothes smelled like they'd been freshly washed.

And it was dark outside.

Meaning I'd missed almost an entire twenty-four hours.

I pushed back the covers and threw my legs over the edge of the bed, wiggling my toes to force some sensation back into them. The sweatpants had to belong to Fang – they sank low on my hips and pooled at my feet.

When I felt confident that I wouldn't collapse, I stood, careful not to jostle Fang. He didn't stir. Jeez.

I caught sight of the clock on the stove— _1:15._ I sighed and padded through the living room and out the front door, welcoming the cool breeze on my face.

For the year I'd lived here with them before the shit hit the fan, this had been my happy place. Our front porch overlooked a steep drop that dumped into a small pond to the right; in the summer, you could hear all sorts of creatures making noises after the sun set. Iggy, Fang and I, all able to pass for eighteen back then, had taken part time jobs. I was waiting tables when we first moved in—Jeb, or the CSM, or some bigwig somewhere had given us the house, so no mortgage was nice, but the electric and gas and everything in between added up—and once I had enough extra money, I went to the hardware store and bought slats of wood.

The result was many bruised thumbs, several heated arguments with flock members, and a pitiful looking outdoor furniture set. It was incredibly uncomfortable, but Nudge was able to magic together a couple of cushions with her secondhand sewing machine, and it became a sort of respite for me.

I sat there for maybe five minutes or so before I realized how absolutely famished I was. I stood, stretched my arms over my head and—

"Holy shit," I moaned. An agonizing, cramping pain exploded in my lower abdomen, causing me to double over and release a high keening noise from between my teeth. Oh, Christ, what was this? I leaned heavily against the shingles of the house, counting backward from fifty. _What the—_

The screen door slammed open, and a figure I'd always recognize as Fang came launching out onto the deck.

"Max," Fang panted, eyes searching wildly in the moonlight for my own. The blanket had left wrinkled lines across his cheek and forehead. If I'd been anyone but me, the panic written all over his handsome features might've gone unnoticed. "What's happening?"

"'m fine," I gasped, wrapping an arm around my abdomen and trying not to hurl all over the deck. Fang fell to his knees in front of me, grabbing my free hand and looking up into my eyes with an expression that suggested I might be dying.

"Seriously," I said between breaths, squeezing my eyes shut to distract from the pain. "Fine."

Fang cast a long look to the door. "Fang," I snapped, the pain slinking away like a wave from the shore. He turned back to face me. "I'm fine. Trust me. Just a… cramp," I forced out.

I straightened to my full height and met his gaze again. His eyes were sinkholes, pupils almost as big as his irises. There was a battle going on somewhere deep in his head. I shot him a questioning look.

"What do you remember?" he asked. I could tell he was trying to be tender with me but some other emotion—rage, or pain, or something else entirely—was overcoming it.

"Nudge asking me if I wanted to shower. Almost falling over in the living room. You telling her you thought I should get the fluids first."

Fang's hands clenched to fists at his sides. I noticed they were wrapped, the bandages stained with blood along his knuckles. What the hell had I missed? "Fang, your hands."

"A lot happened after that," he said tightly. Again with that tender expression, like he was about to tell me my dog died.

My stomach responded with a loud gurgle. Fang's face went completely blank for a split second before erupting into a brilliant smile and I melted; it was one I hadn't seen in years. He pushed me gently back on to the cushion of the loveseat. "Wait here," he ordered, and turned and walked back into the house.

He returned with a fluffy blanket, leftovers—Iggy had made lasagna—and a couple of bottles of water. He tucked the blanket around my shoulders and handed me the steaming plate. I reached for a bottle of water first. I cracked it open and drained it in a grossly short amount of time.

Fang cocked an eyebrow and the corners of his lips turned up into a smile. He was emoting a lot more than I was used to, but whether it was from the events of the last day or the result of four years of maturation, I couldn't tell. "Thirsty?"

I rolled my eyes. Unfortunately, he was still an insufferable asshat. "Obviously."

The smile didn't leave his face. One of his huge hands, warm and calloused, brushed the skin of my cheek so softly I could've imagined it. I forced away the feeling of unease and folded my eyebrows in a questioning look.

"I can't remember the last time I heard your voice," he murmured. "The first thing you say to me is, ' _I'm fine.'_ Excuse me for being a bit nostalgic."

Before I was able to process, his hand was gone from my face.

He took the spot next to me on the loveseat, leaning back and stretching his legs out in front of him. He folded his hands behind his head and let his eyes shut. I found my words.

"I can't believe I didn't wake you up when I got out of bed. You've really let your guard down."

One corner of his mouth curled up, but he didn't open his eyes. "Probably because you've got more of my blood in you than I do right now."

A weird fluttering feeling rose in my chest. I buried it back down. "How many—"

"Don't worry about it," he said in that incredibly exasperating way of his.

I didn't have the energy to spat with him, so I turned back to the lasagna. For a while, the only sound filling the air was me inhaling my first meal in God knows how many days.

"This was the first place I checked four years ago when I realized you were missing from your bed," he said after a while, gesturing to the porch. "When you weren't here, I panicked."

This was his way of acknowledging the frantic state he'd been in when he first came flying out the front door. I put a hand on his shoulder. He finally met my eyes. "Not this time," I said softly.

I'd worked my way through the rest of the lasagna when my brain was finally clinking on all cylinders. "Four years, huh?"

Fang cast a sideways look at me and nodded slowly. His eyes said _are you sure you want to go there?_

"Humor me."

He sighed. "Nudge is finishing up high school."

I nodded. This made sense. When we'd finally settled in the house, I'd allowed myself a weeklong judgement lapse in which Angel may or may not have manipulated the brains of several office workers, from the social security office, to different hospitals throughout New England, to the DMV. As a result, we all now had social security numbers, birth certificates, and real names. Iggy, Fang and I had high school diplomas. Fang and I even had driver's licenses.

We'd made the executive decision that we'd age ourselves two years ahead in our official papers. This would make Nudge eighteen years old in the eyes of the government.

"Made a lot of friends, looking into colleges. Software engineering."

Friends. Colleges. _Software engineering._ Holy shit. "You'd almost think she was normal," I mused.

Fang snorted. "Yeah, except for the wings and one-man Geek Squad part."

I slapped his arm. "Hey! Just because she's a strong, independent woman going into a largely male-dominated field…"

Fang rolled his eyes, making an exaggerated face of disinterest. "Iggy, obviously, is outshining us all. Considered going to get a degree of some sort, but there's not much of a market for blind medical professionals."

"And you?"

He shrugged and sat back again, shutting his eyes. "Took a couple of coding classes online, but it got to a point where money was so tight that I just needed something that would pay well. One of Nudge's friends from school mentioned that her father was looking for more workers for his construction business. Under the table, forty hours a week, gets me outside."

I understood what he was saying. Fang was not like Iggy—I knew he would never deal with what had happened to us by accepting it and overcoming it. He, like me, would spend every day of his life running from it and fighting his demons in his own way.

I studied his arms, long, tanned, and muscular. We were all strong, but he'd always been the strongest, built tall and sturdy. His biceps and tendons had gone from simply being present underneath the tanned skin of his arms to prominent.

"Are you okay?" he asked, his voice a low rumble. The white skin of his clenched knuckles deceived impassivity of his features.

I was unprepared for the question, but reacted instinctively. "I'm fine." I didn't even convince myself. He gave me a dry look.

Sighing, I leaned back and dropped my head onto Fang's shoulder. He was still so tense, but wrapped an arm around my shoulders in response. "I don't think I'm ready to talk about it," I said so quietly that I wasn't sure Fang heard me.

For a moment, he gave no indication that he did. Then his warm hand cupped my shoulder and gave it a tight squeeze. "You know I won't make you."

I fiddled with the end of his shirt. How could you possibly begin to explain four years of agony? "It was so different from every other time."

"Do you know where you were?"

I shook my head once. "Definitely not Death Valley. Too cold, too wet. I was able to fly here directly from there, so it had to be close."

"You were running on fumes and adrenaline," Fang pointed out. "You could've flown further than you thought."

I swallowed thickly. "I sincerely doubt it."

"So, what? Another School?" Fang asked, tilting his head up from the back of the loveseat.

I could feel my cheeks growing hot, that gnawing anxiety brewing in my chest. Fang knew me better than anyone, knew I'd react this way, but the anger stewing in him was enough to push against the walls I'd put up. "Definitely not," I muttered. "Maybe that's what they intended. But this was less in the name of science and more in the name of senseless torture and sick and twisted fascination."

Fang squeezed my arm a little too tightly before letting it go, wringing his hands together in his lap. He looked like he wanted to ask more, but he wasn't sure what. I had never seen such pain on his features, never felt his explosive anger as tangibly as I could now.

I blew a raspberry, trying to force the stress from me before I spoke. "They definitely took a page out of the School's book, but… it was just different."

"A name," Fang forced out between clenched teeth.

"What?"

"Give me a name," he repeated.

I took another deep breath. "I don't know who the head honcho is. I never met him, and they just referred to him as 'the boss.' He entrusted every single part of that place to his second in command." I could hear my heart slamming my ears. I was on the edge of the loveseat. "His name was Mallory."

"Did he hurt you?"

"No," I lied immediately.

My stomach started cramping again, and through the chaos of my mind and the flurry of Fang's movement to the porch railing, the dark-humored part of me bit back a laugh that this would be the day that my uterus decided to start bleeding again. I hadn't had a regular visit from Aunt Flow in years—the stress and weight loss from my capture had put so many parts of my body out of whack.

I wrapped an arm around my abdomen, forcing myself to breathe. _You are safe. You are home._

Fang was hunched over the railing, gripping the wood so tightly that I was surprised it hadn't splintered under his hands. He was quivering just barely. "Fang," I gasped out, hoping to communicate that this was one of those be-a-lover-not-a-fighter moments.

He turned instantly at the sound of my voice, eyes darting to the hand around my stomach and then my face. The rage softened immediately.

Fang had been a man of so few words for so long that he rarely struggled with what to say when he did want to speak. He was calm, cool, and collected, calculating, reasonable—so much the epitome of a leader that almost every single day since Jeb initially left us, I wondered if it was a mistake that I'd taken that position in such stride.

Now, however, he struggled with what it was he wanted to say. That hesitance only heightened my anxiety. I stuck my head between my legs and tried to control my panic.

"Max," he said delicately, crouching in front of where I sat on the loveseat. Again, his face was an open book; it was one I had no desire to read. He exhaled shakily and put that controlled mask on again, gripping my hands tightly and rubbing his thumbs over the backs of my wrists. He looked a thousand years old.

"You had a miscarriage," he said, and the world stopped spinning.

* * *

Song: "Once Upon Another Time" by Sara Bareilles

Thanks for all the reviews, and a special thank you to Lustrex for her shoutout on _Memory Interrupted._ If you aren't reading it, you're 1) living under a rock and 2) sincerely missing out on a great literary experience.

Out of the blue, I have a lot of personal stuff going on, but I assure you this is a priority of mine, solely because it gives me a break from the chaos of real life. Writing helps me breathe.


	7. Seven

_Meet me tomorrow night or any day you want  
I have no right to wonder just how, or when_

 _You know the meaning fits, there's no relief in this  
I miss my beautiful friend  
I have to send it away to bring her back again_

* * *

SEVEN

I was down the porch steps and puking into the bushes before I'd even fully processed what Fang had said.

I had a _what?_

Fang was muttering a steady stream of curses as he roared up behind me, knotting my hair in one of his fists at the base of my neck. "Should've told you first and then made you eat," he said through clenched teeth. The anger was back.

My stomach rolled with nausea and I heaved again. "Don't think I'll be hungry ever again," I gasped.

The screen door slammed somewhere behind us, but I was a million miles away, trying to fight the blurring darkness threatening the edge of my visual field.

"It wasn't possible," I choked out. "They said it wasn't possible."

Another hand was on my back, and then Iggy's voice was filtering through the chaos. "What's going on?" He was not nearly as practiced in controlling panic as Fang—his voice was high, his touch clumsier than usual.

I wanted to die. I wanted to curl up, never move again, and die.

" _You had a miscarriage."_

I threw up again.

"Nothing," I wheezed. "Fine."

"Obviously not fine," replied Fang. His free hand had moved to the middle of my back, tracing small circles through the thick material of the sweatshirt just a little too intensely.

"Do you think I should call Cara?"

"Who—?" I was able to sputter one word before my stomach rolled again. My throat burned. At this point, there was only bile left in me.

"Stop trying to talk," muttered Fang. Tears had started streaming from the corners of my eyes. My headache was brain-explosion tier, my ribcage was collapsing in on itself, my abdomen felt like a white-hot hand was squeezing the life out of my uterus.

Evidently, something already _had_.

 _I was pregnant._

I don't know how long we went on like that, me eventually just dry heaving into the ferns of the front yard, Fang trying and failing to secure my hair at the base of my neck while rubbing my now sweating back, and Iggy fluttering like a nervous mother duckling around us. Every time one of them suggested calling for backup, I leaned back on my heels and protested, usually making myself gag again.

"You need to try to calm down. Breathe. In. Out." Fang's voice was thick with concern.

I barked a bitter laugh that only forced me to breathe even faster. " _Calm?_ "

"You're going to give yourself an ulcer," Iggy said. "Come on. Deep breaths. Smell the flowers, blow out the birthday candles." He shoved a bottle of water into my hands. "Here. Rinse."

I took it from him and nearly dropped it, my hands were shaking so badly. Fang had to untwist the cap for me. I raised it to my lips slowly, swished, and spit onto the soiled ferns. The two of them were talking behind me, but it was background noise. I was hyperventilating, but I couldn't stop, I couldn't breathe— _another defect,_ they'd said, _it cannot reproduce—_ there was no way I could've had a—

Fang was in my face, eyes locked on mine. Our noses were nearly touching. I could feel his breath on my lips, warm and smelling of cinnamon toothpaste. He was taking long, measured breaths in through his nostrils and then blowing them out his mouth. What the hell was he doing?

After a moment, I realized: subconsciously, I had started mimicking him. My breathing slowed; I felt my lungs expand with an acceptable amount of air. Thirty seconds later, my panic attack had subsided, my brain filled with nothing but the sound of our synchronized exhales and the midnight blue of his eyes.

Somewhere deep, deep down, I felt a glimmer of pride. That was Fang. Closet genius.

I expected to break down after that, honestly. I expected to dissolve into a useless puddle of despair right in front of their eyes. Instead, I leaned back on my heels and cupped my hands over my mouth, completely unable to function.

Jury's still out on whether or not that was a step forward or backward, in terms of my mental state.

Fang was still kneeling in front of me, wide eyes leaping all over my face. "Talk to me," he said, voice just a little too high to be indifferent.

Iggy crouched next to him, a hand on his shoulder. He reached a gentle arm in my direction as if gauging my response. When I didn't move, he wrapped a fond hand around one of my wrists and guided it away from my face.

"Her heart is racing," Iggy was saying. "We should get her inside."

Fang immediately scooped me into his arms with unprecedented gentleness. Suddenly, I was back on the couch. I leant over the edge and buried my face into my hands. One of them tucked several blankets around me. I heard the telltale sounds of a fire being started in the fireplace and the two boys arguing.

"So, what, you thought now was the best time to tell her?" Iggy was all hard consonants and ire.

Fang's voice was quiet, controlled, the perfect complement to Iggy's flame. "She was acting like herself. I'd gotten her to eat. She was having cramping, like Cara said she might."

"I'm still not quite understanding why you felt that _now_ would be the—"

"I will not keep something this big from her. She spent years robbed of basic human rights. It's her body. She needs to know."

Somebody flopped back onto an armchair. The fire was crackling now, and distantly, I could feel it throwing heat toward me. A weight settled next to my huddled form and pulled me toward it, gently rubbing between my wings. Fang.

"What did she tell you?" Iggy asked brokenly.

"Hardly anything. 'Torture' and 'sick, twisted fascination' came up. Do the math."

Iggy was silent for a moment before speaking, his voice thick. " _Shit,_ Max."

Things were calm for a moment: me unable to formulate a coherent thought, Iggy and Fang processing the incredibly embarrassing, demeaning truth that my life had become, the fire providing some sort of distant comfort for all of us.

Then Fang's hand slid to my waist to pull me closer to him.

Whatever reverie I'd dropped into faded, and suddenly I was back there—Mallory was in front of me, his arms around my waist, gripping tightly, his breath at my neck—

" _Maximum," Mallory breathed into my neck, his grumbly tenor voice laced with something sickly sweet, like chloroform. My arms were secured behind my back and he was straddling me, his long, strong legs pinning my own together beneath me. A finger looped around the waistband of my pants. "It's incapacitating, the way you try to resist me," he purred._

Fight the panic, fight the panic, _I repeated, a mantra in my head._ Channel it.

 _I snarled and tried to buck him off, but I was too weak to even budge the two of us. "I promise you, it's not all that difficult."_

 _His hair was bunched into a greasy ponytail low on his head. It dangled down into my face, reeking of cigarette smoke and sweat. His arms came down from next to my head to part my thighs and lock them up by my hips. He secured his palms at my waist. I struggled, but it was no use—my strength was a fraction of what it had been, and he was so, so strong; genetically modified strong._

" _I thought the boss was never going to let me have you. Too young, he said," he murmured, trailing his lips down my neck and to my chest, covered in a long-sleeved thermal. He bit at the spandex and my heart began to pound, that incontrollable feeling of complete and utter panic beginning to rear its ugly head. My breaths came quicker, my vision blurred. Something trickled down my cheeks. It took me a moment to recognize that they were tears. "Two years later, and here we are."_

 _I choked out a half-sob. Maximum Ride, once the tentative savior of the world, had been reduced to this. A plaything. A broken, battered, and abused prisoner. My lungs were barely inflating. "You like that?" he growled, a massive hand pushing up the fabric of my shirt. They wandered upward to my chest._

 _My body was paralyzed with complete terror. I had fought Erasers, incapacitated grown men, I had been subjected to years of torture, but I had never been threatened in this way. It had an effect on me that I could have never been prepared for._

 _With superhuman strength, he lifted me swiftly and pulled off my pants, leaving me in only the plain cotton underwear they provided. I struggled feebly, but he was already there between my legs, unzipping his pants and pushing aside excess material._

" _Happy eighteenth birthday," he said, and he broke me, once and for all._

"Max!" This was a different voice, and I came back to the present to find an entirely different scene than the one I'd left behind.

I was in front of the fireplace, Fang pinned beneath me on the hardwood. My hands were securing pressure on his windpipe. His fingers were prying at mine, his muscles tensing as he moved them just enough to allow himself to breathe. The look in his eyes was one I'd never seen before—fear, for one, but an incredible amount of pity that made me sick to my stomach.

" _It's incapacitating, the way you try to resist me—"_

A pair of hands wrapped around me from behind, startling me into releasing my grip on Fang. Then, they were holding my hands behind my back— _my hands were secured behind my back and he was straddling me—_

I rounded on my captor, landing a hard right hook into his nose before realizing it was Iggy, my blind brother, that I'd punched. He stumbled a few steps backward, a hand to his face, the other in front of him in a "don't shoot" gesture. I stopped where I was and froze.

 _Fireplace. Couch. Pictures on the mantel._

"She's having a flashback—don't touch her—she doesn't know where she is," Iggy jammed out. His nose leaked like a faucet.

Fang made a wide arc in the living room and approached me head-on, as if not to frighten me further. The skin of his neck was red; I could see where my thumbs had tried crushing his Adam's apple. Just like that, I was back in the living room, this was Fang and Iggy, and my entire body was violently quaking as I processed the last sixty seconds.

A horrified noise left me and I drew a hand to my mouth. "Oh, my God," I breathed, and I staggered backward.

I saw the exact moment Fang made the executive decision to throw himself at me anyway, wrapping himself around my smaller, trembling figure like a vine. His composure waned and his weight slumped against me. His face was in my hair and his arms were at my back, crushing me so tightly to him that I idly registered that he had every single ability to break me.

That was the difference, though; it was the reason I didn't go back to that place despite the intimacy of our moment. I filled myself with the smell of him. _Cedar, cotton, and home._ He didn't break me. And he never would.

My arms wrapped around his waist as he began to shake. Behind him, I saw Iggy's strong face dismantle. "I'm so sorry," Fang said into my hair.

Sorry? For me trying to strangle him? For the raging instability that broke Iggy's nose? It was such an absurd thing for him to say, and I tried to tell him as much.

Before I was able to find the words, though, I came to the debilitating conclusion that right now, right here in my arms, Fang was crying for the first time in his life. He was apologizing to me for all of it: the captivity, the torture, the abuse. My knee-jerk reaction to attack the both of them after something as simple as his hand at my waist had triggered a primal suffering somewhere at the pit of him.

And he was crying.

It wasn't his to apologize for, but the magnitude of the sentiment was not lost on me. I was the one who dealt with the hard decisions, was the bad guy when necessary, had raised the younger kids in Jeb's absence. But Fang had always, always been the calm to my storm; the one to crack jokes when I was upset, the one who kept me in line when I was too intense, the one who held me when I couldn't keep my act together. Yes, the flock looked to me in times of trouble. But Fang was the only one of us who had truly never wavered in strength.

Seeing him in a state like this and knowing it was because of me was nearly enough to send me off the deep end. But like he'd stayed strong for me so many times, I had no choice but to let him flatten me against him.

We stood there for who knows how long, me gently stroking the tertial feathers at the middle of his back. My hair was damp, but he was no longer making tears, just shaking slightly in my arms. He still held me so tightly that it bordered on painful.

"Fang," I breathed after a while, entirely uncertain of how to proceed. I was shaken. "I'm—"

"I swear to God, if you say you're fine, I will never speak to you again," he answered, untangling his face from my hair. His voice was a bit hoarse but otherwise unruffled, as per usual.

My eyes settled on Iggy, who snorted quietly, then winced as a small smile crept to his lips. He approached us slowly and laid a hand on my back. "Okay?" he said, as if asking permission to touch me. His nose had stopped bleeding.

I stepped back from Fang and wrapped my arms around Iggy. "I am so sorry," I mumbled into his chest. He stroked my back in that feathery way only he could.

"My mistake," he said, his chest rumbling at my ear. "I got cocky. Should've never forgotten that you can kick my ass."

I pulled away from him and turned back to Fang, who had composed himself. It was nearly impossible to tell that he'd just broken down; his reddened eyes and cheeks were the only indicators that he was anything but business as usual.

He didn't look embarrassed or ashamed. I found myself envying his imperturbability once again.

I sat myself back on the edge of the couch, Fang sitting beside me and Iggy settling cross-legged in front of us on the floor. Neither of them touched me. A shiver ripped through me.

"I still need to process," I said quietly. I kept my eyes on the area rug, freckled with browns and mossy greens, thinking back to that night I'd escaped. It felt like a lifetime ago.

I saw Iggy nod somewhere in my peripheral vision. "We're not going to force you to talk about anything," he said gently.

"There's no way I had a miscarriage."

The words dropped like Little Boy on Hiroshima in the thick air. This was the second time my entire sanity was laid out in front of my family before the sun had even risen for the day. Neither of them said anything, and I raked my eyes up to meet both of them. They seemed to be communicating wordlessly. How Iggy could do that without the ability to see would forever puzzle me.

"Well?" I snapped.

"Iggy had one of his friends from work stop by last night," Fang said quietly. "A nurse."

I launched off the couch as if catapulted and spun to stare at the pair of them. "I'm sorry," I forced through gritted teeth, "I'm going to need you to repeat yourself. You made it sound like you let a _complete stranger_ into this house to look at me after I showed up after being imprisoned for _four years."_

"Oh, no," said Iggy, shaking his head, a bit of color coming back to his pale face. "You don't get to be like that. You have no idea, Max—we were completely out of options. It was either that or take you to the emergency department ourselves."

"You were entirely out line—"

"Did you see yourself? Oh, no, wait, I'm sorry—you couldn't. Because you were _unconscious!_ "

There was the anxiety again, big puffs of air coming out but nothing coming back in. I leaned forward into a tripod position.

Fang tentatively nudged my foot with his own. Iggy inhaled hugely and scooched closer to my feet on the floor. He spoke quietly. "Max. Nudge was in the bathroom with you. You were bleeding everywhere. Do you honestly think Fang and I had any idea how on earth to deal with that? It wasn't like you'd broken a leg or something. You were bleeding. A _lot._ From a part of your anatomy that we aren't exactly experts on."

I looked up to meet his eyes, and then Fang's. Iggy looked incredibly somber. Fang's face was pulled so tightly I thought he might break his jaw.

"Fang was ready to ship you off to Metro-General, wings be damned. If I wasn't confident that Cara would come to bail us out and keep her mouth shut about all of it, I would've been right there with him."

What felt like an infinite silence spread over us. In reality, it must've only been a few seconds. When I finally spoke, I had every intention of exuding that leaderly air I'd mastered. Instead, I sounded so, so small. "They said it wasn't possible."

Iggy reached up an impossibly long arm to grasp my hand and gave me a look that could've melted Joseph Stalin. A heartbreaking smile formed on his calamine lips. "Since when has anything about us cared about what's impossible?"

Absently, one of my hands dropped to my abdomen, flat, taut, and nearly concave against my hipbones. Twenty-four hours ago, a life had been growing here; tiny and spawned out of hatred, but still, a life. An incredible emptiness tugged at the base of my lungs.

More prominently, I was flooded with a dizzying sense of relief that almost led me to vomit again.

I could've continued to deny it; I could've told them was impossible for me to be pregnant—that nothing had occurred physically to potentiate that possibility. But it would've been a lie. I knew it, Iggy knew it, and Fang knew it. So I let a spade be a spade and moved on, filing this monumental discovery away to be dealt with in the near future.

"They'll come back for me," I said brokenly, fighting back the tears that were threatening. I had cried so much in the last two days, it was a wonder there were any left behind my eyes. "You need to leave. Whatever normalcy you guys have had for the last few years isn't going to last very long. They came for me once, they'll come for me again."

Iggy laughed bitterly. I could tell his patience was wearing thin, and he was trying so, so hard not to go Classic Iggy on me. " _Christ_ , Max. Honestly? Okay, sure. Fang, let's start packing up. Max, you can stay here, the rest of us are going to bail. Trash day is Tuesday. Make sure you bring the barrels to the—"

Fang's voice was stony and unreadable. "We will stay here. And we will fight them if we have to."

I shook my head violently. "You don't understand. They won't hold back." I searched for more words to help them understand, but Iggy, the proverbial stick of dynamite, was too far beyond listening for anything I could've possibly come up with to matter.

"No shit. You don't say?"

"Iggy," Fang growled, his voice dangerous. It was a warning.

Iggy sighed for what must've been the billionth time. Closing his eyes, he seemed to allow Fang's composure, like a wave tasting the shore, to extinguish the inferno he'd let overcome him. "All you ever talked about was how we needed to stick together, that we were a unit. The six of us. When are you going to realize that that includes you?"

His words deflated me; I sank to the ground and sort of leaned into him on the floor. He turned and raised his hands, quirking an eyebrow like a question mark. I knew what he wanted to do—he'd done it to all of us from time to time, growing up. I drew one of his hands to my cheek and nodded.

The other one found the other side of my face and he traced my features with his deft fingertips, mapping the grooves of my dimples, the cuts on my forehead. The concavity of my cheeks turned his face into a pained scowl, but he didn't say what was on his mind.

His hands fluttered over my shoulders, palpating the jutting clavicles that sat underneath the thick sweatshirt. I swallowed hard— _Iggy, this is Iggy, he just wants to see you._

He must've heard me swallow, because his hands flew back to his own sides. I started to tell him that I was okay, that he could keep feeling. "Ig—"

He shook his head. "No, it's okay," he muttered. "You're skinnier than when we first got out of the School. When we were _ten_."

I could see the question on his lips— _what did they do to you?—_ but he thought better of it and didn't ask. Maybe because he knew I didn't have an answer.

The two of them tried to force me to eat more lasagna, but there was no way I was going to possibly keep anything down, let alone more of what I'd painfully vomited up for ten minutes. I told them as much and they dropped the subject.

"You need rest," Fang said quietly, and Iggy nodded his head in agreement.

"Your room is still up there, you know. We never touched it."

* * *

Fang pushed open the bedroom door for me, stepping backward to let me advance in front of him. "After you."

The carpet was soft under my bare feet; I wiggled my toes a little bit, remembering how many times I'd done the same years ago. I took a deep breath, and Fang's hand found my shoulder tentatively. I leaned into his palm, hoping to demonstrate that I wasn't going to completely unravel in front of him again.

"You really didn't touch it," I breathed, kicking a stray pair of jeans I'd left inside-out next to my desk.

"Nudge dusted from time to time. But the kids really believed that if we left it the same, you'd make it back to us." He shrugged a shoulder, eyes impenetrable. "Looks like they weren't entirely wrong."

I managed half a smile and moved toward the bed, which was made. "Funny, I don't remember making my bed before they drugged me in my sleep and dragged me out the window."

It was meant to be dark humor, but Fang didn't laugh. "Blood all over the bedspread. For maybe a week, none of us could really bear to go in here, but eventually Iggy came in and stripped the bed."

"Ah."

I ran my fingers over the bedspread. It was white with brown and cream colored feathers freckled across it. Fang had seen it in Wal-Mart, wordlessly held it up to me, and I'd laughed out loud. "It's so _you_ ," he'd deadpanned.

Back in the Mesozoic Era.

"My room is across the hall," Fang began.

"I remember," I whispered.

"If you need anything, I'll be there in a second."

"You're not staying?"

It came out of me before I could phrase it more poignantly. A look of something crept onto Fang's face—relief, maybe?—and he nodded once and started wringing his hands together again. It was a habit he hadn't had four years ago.

"Let me grab some pillows and my blanket, I can crash right here." He motioned to the floor next to my bedside table.

I snorted. "Honestly? I'm not _completely_ ruined. You're you. I think I'll be okay if you sleep next to me. You know, on the _bed._ Instead of the floor."

"You're the boss. Let me go change."

* * *

Song: "Morning Theft" by Jeff Buckley.

 **Short novella of an author's note incoming:**

I struggled a lot with this chapter. Like, probably more than is necessary or really acceptable for somebody to struggle with a chapter of FanFiction. One of the first scenes I wrote was Fang's breakdown after Max's reaction to his touch. As I read back over it, I was concerned that I wouldn't get a good response to Fang showing so much emotion. I warred with it for a while, considered switching it to a Max breakdown, but it didn't feel nearly as authentic.

For one: I am the author, and even I am getting freaking whiplash from alternating from character to character being a hot mess. But I want to do justice to this topic, to this scenario, and to the position I have placed our favorite birdkids in, so whiplash for everyone!

Secondly, and more importantly:

In the short six chapters of this fic, I have already written Max on every part of the emotional spectrum. And that's all well and good—it is the way it should be, I feel—but again, a large part of this story is about the changes in Fang as a character (and, truly, the rest of the flock). Through the first three books, he and Max are not an established couple, but James Patterson has bluntly hinted at the feelings between them. It's no mystery that the two of them are fiercely protective of each other and, obviously, helplessly infatuated.

So I tried to put myself in his shoes—this young man who has dedicated every waking moment of his life to putting on the strong face, to holding it together in the face of danger, fear, near-death experiences, devastation, and the cracks in the armor of others (namely Max). He was forced to grow up more so than he ever had before when Max was taken and he was suddenly in charge of the four remaining flock members; had to manage the finances, manage Nudge's raging hormones, manage a household of growing kids.

And here we are, four years after his best friend since birth (give or take) is taken and he's already accepted the fact that she's dead, and she shows up on his doorstep battling for her life and looking like something from a concentration camp. To add on to this, she has had a miscarriage and demonstrates signs and symptoms of sexual abuse. She is distraught, so he moves to comfort her with something as simple as a touch to the waist—a tender gesture, something he's done a million times before—and she gets this wild look in her eyes and feels the need to nearly kill him in response from her detached state.

And it breaks him, because it's no longer this clinical picture painted by a nurse, it's not something that she can deny and prove wrong. It makes all of it real. And suddenly this unflappable woman he has watched break barriers and overcome every obstacle has been objectified and fractured in the most tragic of ways.

The TL;DR here is that this is my story, and I know I won't make everybody happy, but this is the way it's going to play out for me, and this is how I'm going to characterize the people in it. I promise you, over the next however many chapters, we will see plenty of emotions from Max, plenty of opportunities for her to be comforted, countless exchanges where she'll be the one under the gun. But I will not paint her as entirely helpless and unwilling to put her own troubles aside for someone else, because, inherently, that is not who she is. I may stand by the fact that people change as they transition into adulthood, but the things that truly make us who we are typically remain steadfast. And, no, Fang's My Chemical Romance-esque silence is not something I consider as "making him who he is."

In the books, these are young adolescents (albeit they have seen a lot, but they're still 6-14 years old). I personally have changed a lot since those days; I understand the weight that the world can carry much, much more; I value my personal relationships more. Thus, I feel Fang and Max and all of them, really, should act differently than was initially portrayed in the novels. All the above being said, you are completely entitled to be unhappy with my artistic choices as the author, and if you find the scenario not believable that is of course your prerogative.

This author's note is nearly as long as the fucking chapter and I apologize so I'll shut my mouth here. I just wanted to clarify my own rationales here to hopefully provide some insight into this neurotic brain of mine.

Might be a little longer for an update; again, life is crazy, work is crazy, everything is madness. Thanks for all the love!

PS: I don't have a beta, and I'm really, really bad at proofreading. So if you notice any mistakes - please let me know!


	8. Eight

_We've wanted to be trusty and true, but feathers fell from our wings  
And we've wanted to be worthy of you, but weather rained on our dreams_

 _And we can't take back what is done, what is past  
So fellas, lay down your fears, 'cause we can't take back  
What is done, what is past: so let us start from here_

* * *

EIGHT

I watched Fang retreat into the hall and fought some absurd terror that I'd never see him again.

I pulled Iggy's sweatshirt over my head, leaving me naked from the waist up. I turned to my dresser, pulling open a drawer, and found myself completely paralyzed staring at the shirts thrown haphazardly in there. For a fleeting, hysterical moment, I felt like Daisy fucking Buchanan in Gatsby's mansion.

It wasn't even like they were beautiful shirts, either. Just—these clothes were from another lifetime. They smelled like the old me, had been picked out by the old me. And there was no way I was the old me anymore.

I ran my hands over my jutting hipbones. I counted each of my ribs, clearly visible beneath the elastic skin of my abdomen. Iggy was right. I'd never been this thin, ever.

That's how Fang found me a few minutes later. My bare back was to him, and I never would've known he was there if he didn't cough slightly from the doorway. My hands flew to my chest and I looked over my shoulder, panic rising in my throat. "I'm sorry," I spluttered, hugging my arms around myself. God, was I an idiot. "I just—I can't—"

"I grabbed you a sweatshirt of mine," he said. His face was impassive as he raised a giant hand to cover his eyes and held out the other. "And sweatpants."

The panic eased away, and I smiled a big, genuine smile. I took the clothes from him, letting my fingertips linger on his palm just a second longer than I probably needed to. I was still so cold to the bone from my flight after the cliff dive, and he was so, so warm. _Cedar and cotton and and home._ "Thank you."

After I'd changed, I crawled into bed, allowing the warm comforter to engulf me. Fang climbed in next to me, close enough to make me feel protected, but not so close as to suffocate me. I don't think he had recovered entirely from my flashback earlier.

He faced my back, his breathing so quiet I could've forgotten he was even there if I weren't able to practically feel his eyes drilling holes into me.

"I don't want to talk about it," I said as a disclaimer. I poked my left wing through the slit in the sweatshirt, biting back a low groan as the feathers shuffled against the aching muscles.

"Wasn't going to ask you to," he responded.

* * *

"I don't _want_ to go to school," the Gasman half-whined into his glass of orange juice early the next morning. It was Monday. I was running on maybe an hour or so of sleep. Fang hadn't moved an inch as I tossed and turned for the better part of three hours, but no part of me believed he actually allowed himself to let his guard down. At any rate, he hadn't badgered me to talk, so I couldn't complain much.

Angel had padded into my room at some point and folded herself into my side, right between Fang and I. We both cried for a long time. Fang, mercifully, pretended to be asleep the entire time. I might've even believed his act if it weren't for the white-knuckled grip he held on the blanket as Angel comforted me, a role reversal I never could've predicted years ago.

I always said that all five flock members were my children, but Angel really fit the bill. This was the girl I'd watched grow from a baby. In the end, it was the rise and fall of her back against my front that rocked me to sleep as the sun was beginning to rise.

"Max has been back for like, two seconds, and we're not even allowed to stay home?"

I snorted from where I'd spent the better part of fifteen minutes picking apart the massive omelet Iggy had dumped on my plate and ruffled the Gasman's platinum cowlick. "And you really thought I'd support the 'play hooky' cause? Please."

The two of them had come down a half hour before to find me sitting at the table and talking quietly to Iggy and Fang. Nudge, of course, I had seen the night of my initial crash landing, but because I was feeling more like myself instead of a deranged animal, we were able to have a more appropriate reunion.

The Gasman, however, hadn't seen me conscious yet. The sight of me standing upright reduced him to tears. All, you know, _almost six feet of him._ He was taller than me by a couple of inches, at least. It was shaping up to look like I was going to be the shortest out of the six of us.

It was alarming how comfortably we fell back into routine. My heart soared just to be around them, of course, but it was almost as if I'd never left, the ease with which we transitioned back into things.

Fang was at the counter next to Iggy, chopping vegetables for the omelets. "Finish your breakfast. You're due at the bus stop in ten," he said in that cool way of his, but the undertone was all business. It was incredibly endearing to see him in this role, but it also stirred a sort of jealousy in me that I hadn't felt since the days of Anne Walker. I guess he hadn't had much of a choice but to take over in my absence.

"No apron?" I asked him, trying to keep my features composed.

He offered an exasperated expression. A smile pulled at my lips and dissolved quickly. I knew he was watching me like a hawk. Pushing my food around the plate didn't fool him in the slightest.

I pulled a long sip of black coffee, savoring the bitterness between my lips. The first cup Fang had made me was the same way I'd taken it years ago—cream, extra sugar. It had been so many years since I'd had table sugar in _anything_ , so I'd instantly spit it back into the cup. Fang's eyes widened a fraction. Iggy joked that they weren't trying to poison me, I laughed, and the tension was gone.

"I still don't see why I can't get a car," Nudge grumbled from across the table. In her skinny jeans and knitted top, she looked more like a model for the Gap than a high schooler. The blazer she'd throw over her shirt to hide the bulge of her brilliant, tawny wings hung over the back of her chair.

Iggy sighed over the skillet. I had an overwhelming feeling that this was not a new conversation. "Nope," he simply said. "We're not going there."

" _Martha_ got a car."

"Really, now," Iggy said conversationally, dumping chopped up peppers and onions onto the skillet. "Fascinating. What percent avian is Martha?"

"It isn't even anything fancy. Just a beat up old Camry or something."

"Tell me more. Did she get her wings before, during, or after the test tube?"

"Can't afford a car," said Fang, his calm voice powerful enough to cut over their spat. "You know that, Nudge."

Nudge groaned and ran a perfectly moisturized hand over her made-up face. "I know, I know. _God_ , just let me wallow for once."

Gazzy choked back a laugh, eyebrows shooting into the stratosphere. "For _once?_ "

"Hey!" Nudge shouted, reaching a hand out wide towards the counter. A can of green beans flew into her grasp, and she quickly lobbed it Gazzy's head. He dodged and caught it with precision.

"Why can't _I_ get a car?" Gazzy wailed in a perfect imitation of Nudge's voice. "'Out, _out_ , brief candle! Life's but a walking _shadow_ , a poor player that struts and frets his _hour_ upon the—'"

An ear-splitting whistle reverberated through the kitchen, and Nudge, Gazzy and I all whipped our heads to face the stove, where Iggy stood wielding a spatula and a death stare. His apron had a picture of Stevie Wonder on it. Fang was shoulder-to-shoulder with him, a paring knife in his left hand and moccasins on his feet. Standing alongside each other with formidable looks on their faces, they could've truly been an intimidating duo, but the domesticity of the situation sort of detracted from the threat.

For me, at least. Nudge and the Gasman, though, paled instantly at the sight of them, night and day at the head of the kitchen. Clearly, I had missed years of serious discipline at the hands of my two birdboys.

"Enough," Fang said simply, and that was the end of it: Nudge and Gazzy turned back to their breakfasts.

Angel came down the stairs, her blond curls bouncing out of her low ponytail. She was all long legs and fair features, sapphire eyes still groggy with sleep. She brightened at the sight of me. "Morning, sweetie," I breathed, and reached out to rub her back. Out of habit, I clamped down on my thoughts.

"Morning," she said tiredly. She reached for a glass and poured herself some juice as Iggy dropped an omelet on her plate and a kiss on her head.

I nearly broke my neck with the double take. _Iggy. Kissing Angel on the head._

"How are you feeling?" Angel asked, breaking me from my reverie.

"Getting there," I said with a smile. She offered one back and sat next to me at the table.

The Gasman and Nudge finished their breakfasts and hugged me goodbye, both so tightly that I suspected they weren't ready to let me out of their sight just yet. "I'll see you in, like, seven hours. Countdown starts now."

"More like nine hours, for me," Nudge said, tucking her backpack over her shoulders. "I have Robotics Club after school."

I paused to see if she was joking. She wasn't.

 _Robotics Club._ Jesus.

"Yes, and I have organic basket weaving," said Gazzy seriously.

" _Organic_ —?"

"He's being an ass," Iggy said. "Scram, both of you."

The two of them headed out, throwing open their wings as they walked down the porch. The sight of it took my breath away—the last time I'd seen the two of them, they still had downy feathers, their wings not fully grown. But Gazzy's were just as big as mine were, now.

My right wing twitched against its binding. The pain was subsiding, but I still probably needed another couple of days before it could support any weight. My left was still aching fiercely from my escape flight. I longed to be back in the sky.

I shot a confused look toward Angel after they were just specks above the horizon.

Angel shrugged at me, scraping her plate clean with her fork. "Nudge went through that phase where everyone was annoying. Then she grew out of it, but Gazzy started. Now they drive each other insane all the time."

"Good Lord," I muttered. Fang, Iggy and I hadn't really had _time_ to be normal teenagers; I was clueless as to how to deal with this.

"No shit," Fang muttered back.

His eyes turned to Angel and softened in the way they only ever did for her. There was a chance Fang would never be a real father, but the way he looked at Angel had always made it clear as day to me: she was his. I think I was the only one who knew him well enough to pick it apart from his usual aloofness. "Bus in an hour, Ange."

Angel smiled her million-watt smile again and stood from her chair. "I'm gonna go shower," she announced. "Thanks for breakfast, Fang."

" _Fang?_ " screeched Iggy, whirling on his heel. His sightless eyes were huge. "Thanks for breakfast _Fang?_ "

Fang was actually chuckling. Iggy's head was swiveling between Fang and Angel.

Angel giggled, a pealing bell sound that I hadn't heard in so, so long. It tugged at my freaking heartstrings. " _Relax,_ Iggy," she said, adding an eyeroll for no one's benefit. "As if any of us could forget who the Top Chef is here."

Iggy huffed a breath and turned back to the skillet. "Don't you forget it," he grumbled.

Angel gave me a quick hug and was up the stairs. Fang still hadn't wiped the smile off of his face.

"How's the omelet?" Iggy asked after we heard the shower start. He flopped an omelet onto Fang's plate and started on one for himself. Fang wound his way around the table and sat in the chair Angel had vacated.

"So good," I lied, picking my fork up again. "I forgot how good your cooking was."

Iggy didn't miss a beat—didn't even change his body language by a millimeter. "Let me guess. She hasn't even touched it yet."

"Bingo," said Fang.

Insufferable. "Can you really blame me?" I snapped. "Last time I tried to eat something, it ended up all over your honeysuckles."

" _Our_ honeysuckles."

"Circumstances are a little different," said Fang.

"Max, you love a good Western," Iggy said, motioning to the omelet on my plate. "If you can't handle it, then we'll try something else. Toast. A smoothie. I don't care."

"You need to eat," Fang added in a no-nonsense tone. "You're doing okay with the coffee."

"It's _black coffee._ "

"Did they even feed you?" Iggy said.

The sentence hung in the air of the kitchen. Next to me, Fang swallowed the bite of omelet he'd been chewing.

"MREs," I said. Iggy made a confused face.

"Meals Ready-To-Eat," Fang answered quietly.

Iggy blanched. "What, was this place military?"

I shrugged and stabbed a piece of ham with my fork, bringing it to my mouth and forcing myself to chew. It was rubbery and had cooled significantly in the half hour since Iggy had pulled it from the stove.

Fang tapped my plate once with his fingernail, and Iggy snagged it and threw the omelet back on the skillet.

"Dunno," I answered. "Don't think so. It's not like everyone walked around in fatigues. I don't think they had too expansive of a kitchen, though, so they must've just ordered the MREs in bulk. I usually got two a day."

"Well, no wonder," Fang said, his hands twisting into each other again, knuckles white. "Those are only like twelve hundred calories each, give or take."

"We burn more than that in twenty-four hours spent sleeping, let alone…" Iggy trailed off. He dropped the omelet back on my plate.

I could feel Fang's gaze burning into the side of my head. I needed to change the subject. "Don't you idiots work?"

"Going in at eleven this morning for a sixteen-hour shift," said Iggy proudly.

I looked pointedly at Fang. He shrugged. "Sick time."

Iggy laughed. "Fang hasn't taken a day off since he started three and a half years ago."

"I don't need a babysitter," I said, voice fierce.

"No," Fang agreed, reaching for his coffee. "But I thought maybe some company would be nice."

* * *

I was able to eat the entire omelet without barfing, which was, in reality, a major win for Team Max. As nauseous as I felt at the beginning, Westerns were always my favorite, and I'll be damned if Iggy can't cook a killer omelet.

Angel left for school and not long after, Iggy suited up in his lavender scrubs and came down the stairs with his work bag.

"Cara's working today," he said.

"Thank her for me," I said, rinsing my plate off in the sink. Next to me, Fang was drying and putting away the rest of the breakfast dishes.

When he didn't answer right away, I turned just in time to catch a blush creeping to Iggy's cheeks.

"Oh, my _God,_ " I practically squealed. I accidentally sent suds flying into the air. "You _like_ her!"

"Come on, Max, how old are we—"

"You _like_ her!"

Iggy groaned. "She's smart, I work with her all the time, and she doesn't care that I'm blind. I'm also pretty sure she's cute. Sue me."

"Iggy—"

"Drop it, Max. There was no point, it was only a matter of time before she'd find out about the wings and the freak show and the whole bit."

I nodded. Fang had given me the CliffNotes version of their whole evening with Cara that night I was TKOed. "Okay. So what difference does that make?"

A tight, bitter smile came to Iggy's lips. "I'm part _bird._ I also have more baggage than a passenger jet. I don't even know why we're having this conversation."

"Did you ever think that maybe the wings and the baggage, oh, I don't know, _don't matter_ to her?"

"Jesus, Max, she's a _coworker_. I'm not going to talk about this with you," he said, and turned to storm out the door.

At the last minute, he stopped, turned around, and stalked over to me, pulling me into a hug.

"I still love you, no matter how huge of a jackass you may be," he said in my ear, and before I was able to even formulate a response, he was out the door and in the sky, massive, white-grey wings stroking powerfully in the sunlight.

Fang read my expression and smiled crookedly. "He tell you he loved you?"

"Who is that, and what have you done with Iggy?"

Fang shrugged. "He wasn't lying the other night. Everything came back for him after they took you. He dealt with it in his own way. He's different now."

Different was an understatement. "You two could have a sitcom. _Two Mutant Dads_ or something."

Fang rolled his eyes. He reached out a hand and took mine, starting to pull me toward the back door. I stood my ground and absentmindedly ran my thumbs over the new scars and callouses on his hands.

I looked up and met his eyes. I could practically hear the cogs of that brilliant mind of his whirring, and for a fleeting moment, I considered what a shame it was that while the rest of the flock was living their dreams of normalcy, he'd sacrificed his own, taking a job solely for the fact that it would pay well.

"Stop doing that."

" _What?_ "

"Pitying me."

I flushed. "I—"

"Max. Your face is an open book." He smiled and shook his head, holding me in his gaze like I was some sort of precious jewel. He tugged my hand again, and I unfroze.

He led me into the garden, a huge plot of land a couple hundred yards from the back door. The backyard opened into a huge field that then trailed into a forest lush with trees and brush.

There was a bench in the garden next to a little koi pond, and Fang gently shoved me down onto it. My mind flashed back to the night before with the shirts and Gatsby's mansion. "A koi pond," I said dumbly.

Fang was behind me, his hand prodding through the long sleeve of Nudge's I'd borrowed to massage my left wing. I groaned lowly and I could almost hear his smirk. "Believe it or not, Gazzy's actually the one who tends to all the vegetables."

"You're kidding."

He hummed. "Nope. Kid has a green thumb. Angel deals with the flowers. Koi pond was her idea. She says they don't think very much."

I considered the odd-looking fish and decided I wasn't surprised.

Fang's hands were working through the knotted muscles of my wing. "How did you know it hurt so bad?"

"When you were sleeping," he said, as if that was good enough of an answer. When I didn't say anything, he continued. "You pulled it tight to your back. Like you were used to them being bound there."

I took a deep breath in and bit on the inside of my cheek to fight the anxiety. _You are home. You are safe. This is Fang._

A silent minute passed. Fang kneaded his huge hands into the muscles of my upper back and eventually coaxed my left wing through the slit in the shirt, running his fingers deftly through my feathers.

"How long?" he asked. When I didn't answer, he sighed and let my wing drop. "Max."

"I thought you weren't going to make me talk if I didn't want to."

If he was hurt, he hid it well. "I won't. But you can't sit on all of this forever."

"It's been two days, Fang."

He reached through the slit on the right side of my back and moved his fingers along the feathers of my injured wing. Our wings are incredibly intimate parts of our bodies despite the fact that they're maybe the most pronounced things about us, but Fang's touch triggered no panic response from me. I leaned back into him, and he opened his palm wide to better support my weight.

He tugged at the cotton fabric gently with his free hand. "Take this off. I want to check the break."

I sucked air through my teeth, fast enough to make a low whistling noise. He stiffened behind me and I warily looked over my shoulder at him.

His eyes darted across my face, denim blue and scrutinizing. His own expression was entirely indecipherable. "What?" I asked.

He shook his head and tugged at my shirt again. I sighed and pulled it over my head, leaving me in an old sports bra of Nudge's. The sunlight felt good on my skin, but the breeze gave me goosebumps. "Are you too cold? We can do this inside."

"Sick of being inside," I murmured.

He unwound the ace bandage and tenderly pulled my wing from my back, pausing with each groan and hiss I emitted.

Gently, he palpated the bone I'd broken. It was still sore, but not nearly as painful as it'd been right after I'd fallen on it. "Radius," he said quietly, almost to himself.

I turned my head to the side to address him back. "Lucky fall then, huh?"

"Humerus, we'd be talking a week, even for us," he said.

I knitted my eyebrows together. "Wait. Iggy broke is radius when were eleven, didn't he?"

"Ulna," Fang corrected me. "Bottom bone. A little bit bigger," he said, tapping where it sat beneath my covert feathers. "He was back in the air within a week. Radius is a bit smaller, and Iggy thinks yours was a stable fracture."

"English, please."

I couldn't see his face, but I knew he was smirking that idiotic, endearing smirk of his. "You can try flying tomorrow."

The funny thing about tomorrows is that you can never be sure that they're actually going to come.

* * *

Song: "Trusty and True" Damien Rice.

I recognize that Nudge's magnetism doesn't come into play until The Final Warning, but I wanted to include it. I think it was a cool addition, no matter how little sense it seems to make in the long run (like Angel being able to change her appearance: _porquois?)._

While writing the breakfast scene, I couldn't help but imagining that part of _The Incredibles_ where Dash and Violet are at each other's necks over dinner ("I bet she'd be eating if we were having Tony loaf…")

A bit of clarification on the timeline here: Max was 14-almost-15 when they first moved into the house; they were there for a year before she was taken (so she was 15-almost-16 when she was taken). Her captivity, we learn from Fang, has been for four years. So this makes her 19-almost-20 in present day.

Finally, I'm working on being less descriptive and more concise. It's strange for me, and I feel like it makes my narrative jump around too much. Let me know what you think. I had gotten some feedback about how the story was dragging, and I am in full agreement, but I'm having trouble finding the happy medium between way too descriptive and too choppy. The story is meant to start off slow—I need to sort of establish where we're going to go from here.

I FLEW through proofreading this because I wanted to get it posted before I went into work, so my sincere apologies.


	9. Nine

_Time bends broken bones  
'Til they wrap around your throat  
And snap around your fingers_

 _This is a story about the three of us  
Down by the water and the tide is rising  
This world is burning and I'm terrified  
I need a little more time with you_

* * *

NINE

The rest of the afternoon passed without a hitch—no crippling flashbacks, no sudden attack on my safety. Fang called his boss and officially took a couple of weeks off from work, and I even managed a nap in the middle of the day.

I woke to the smell of garlic and the sound of a fire crackling in the fireplace. Iggy was working until three in the morning again, so that left Fang responsible for the kids. Of course, they were all more than capable of taking care of themselves—a lifetime of no parents and years spent dumpster diving could do that to you—but with this new _eau de domesticity_ they had going on, I guess somebody had to play dad.

I draped the soft throw blanket I'd fallen asleep under over my shoulders and padded into the kitchen. Gazzy and Angel were bent over notebooks at the kitchen table, scribbling out offensive symbols that could only be some sort of algebra.

"Yuck," I said, pulling a face. I hovered over Angel's shoulder and kissed her on the cheek.

Fang was zesting a lemon _(zesting a freaking lemon)_ next to the stove. A pan full of sautéed garlic sat simmering over a low flame. A large pot next to it was at a rolling boil. "Oh, come on. I'm not _that_ bad," he joked, a wry smile lighting his face.

I rolled my eyes. "Not _you,_ Rachael Ray," I muttered. "I was talking about e equals MC squared over here."

I stalked over to the counter and placed a cold hand over his warm one on the zester. His eyes met mine. I felt a blush creep to my cheeks, and he smirked. I rolled my eyes a second time. "Keep doing that, and they'll get stuck that way."

I groaned. "Give me the freaking lemon."

He shook his head. "No way. Haven't you ruined enough produce for one lifetime?"

He was referencing the many years at the E-house wherein I'd attempted different entrees and, each time, failed miserably. Iggy often joked that he evolved—"not unlike Darwin's finches"—into _chef de cuisine_ due to the threat of extinction from my lethal concoctions.

"I am more than capable of zesting a lemon."

Fang shrugged and handed over the half-zested lemon. He pulled at the handle to the fridge and dipped to disappear behind the open door.

"What are we making?" I asked, biting back a gasp as I nearly zested the skin off my index finger. I readjusted my grasp on the lemon and worked a bit more slowly.

"Shrimp scampi," said Fang, reemerging from behind the fridge door with his arms full. He kicked the door shut and placed the loot on the counter. Butter, a bottle of sauvignon blanc, raw shrimp, and Parmesan cheese.

"Pre-grated," I commented, indicating to the cheese. "Taking shortcuts, are we?"

I cut the lemon in half and he passed me some sort of bizarre looking apparatus. I stared at it in his hand.

"Juicer," he said in a voice that suggested he was speaking to a four-year-old.

I snorted and squeezed the half in my hand as hard as I could over the bowl, successfully extracting most of the juice from it. "Luckily, I happen to have _fists."_

Fang chuckled and stirred the pasta in the boiling pot before dropping a slab of butter and the shrimp into the pan with the garlic. His face was still stuck in a stupid, toothy, un-Fanglike smile. "You are too much."

"Better than not enough," I quipped, grinning back at him.

For one ephemeral, beautiful moment, it hit me that I could not remember the last time I had felt so normal.

* * *

It was short-lived.

That night, I dreamt of torture.

Literal, tangible, spirit-crushing torture. They had wanted to study me-that much they'd made abundantly clear from the getgo—but the lengths to which they'd go to force me to cooperate were a bit slower to be revealed.

I awoke with a scream and flung myself from the bed, cramming myself as far into the corner as possible. My left wing fluttered massively, spreading to its full seven and a half feet, and my right wing bulged painfully against the ace bandage binding it. My breaths were coming in gasps—I couldn't breathe, the air was way too hot, I needed to get out the window—

Fang was on the bed, rocketed up on one arm, eyes blinking to adjust to the light. An instant later he was next to me, arms at my shoulders as I reached up to throw his overhuge sweatshirt off and back to pull at the stupid wrapping against my wing.

"Max," he said, eyes raking across my face, ignoring the fact that I was, yet again, just in a sports bra, and, yet again, panicking, in front of him. "You need to breathe."

I clawed at the binding, my fingernails digging gashes into the sensitive skin of my back. Fang's arms were still on my shoulders as I flung the bandage off. I reached my hands up to break his hold on me. When he gripped tighter, a guttural, horrified sound came out of me without consent.

Fang's arms went slack immediately and I pivoted, shoved open the huge sash window behind me, and unfurled my wings for the second time in four years.

I hit superspeed without trying, and as soon as I was in it, I knew it wouldn't last for long. The tips of the oak trees blurred below me in the light of the full moon, my wing was in agony, and I had no idea where I was going.

I stumbled to a stop at the shore of a huge lake five minutes from the house. With the absence of a breeze, the surface of the water looked like glass. The constellations shimmered on it like a painting. A vague sort of peace settled over me, despite every other part of my life suggesting otherwise.

I'd fallen asleep in a pair of Fang's thickest sweatpants again, the knees of which were already damp in the dew of the early, early morning. I leaned forward over the surface of the water, studying my features in the glow the moon allowed.

My breaths were coming out in gasps, so I forced in a deep one and steeled myself. "You're going to hyperventilate," I said to my reflection. "No. You _are_ hyperventilating." I dipped my hands in the water and patted my cheeks. I made myself take yet another deep breath. "Pull it together. _Pull it together._ "

I had so many emotions and no idea which one to feel. I was back with my family, I was ecstatic to be free. I was terrified and dreadful of when they'd come back for me. I felt guilt that I was subjecting the flock to it. And I was so, incredibly, unbelievably _pissed off_ that I had even been forced to live it.

I put my hands back in the water and shoved them underneath the sand, rolling the microscopic pebbles between my fingers and grounding myself in the frigidity of the lake.

Behind me, somebody landed fifty times more gracefully than I had, and I didn't need to look over my shoulder to know it was Fang. The crunching of his bare feet through the sand behind me approached urgently.

He sank to his knees next to me, close enough that I could smell that cinnamon toothpaste. His eyes traveled from my arms and where they disappeared beneath the sand to my back, where my wings were loose and twitching in the rocks of the shore.

Once he'd given my face a long once over, he knelt at my back, stretching my injured wing out as far as it went and inspecting each inch of it. He said nothing as he pushed against the part of the radius I'd broken a couple of days prior. The sharp, biting pain had traded itself for a dull sort of throb.

I didn't notice he'd ripped a strip from the bottom of his sweatshirt until he was dipping the fabric in the lake and gently sponging the cuts on my back with it. I squeaked with pain and surprise and he finished quickly, dropping the makeshift rag next to us in the sand. He nudged me slightly and tugged the sweatshirt over my head, coaxing my hands from the water to thread them through the sleeves. He was left in a white tee shirt and black athletic shorts.

My breaths became ragged again as I thought back to earlier in my bedroom. "I'm sorry," I said brokenly. A single, stupid, solitary tear leaked from my eye. My chest was white-hot with squelched devastation for more things than I could possibly count.

Fang's immediate tenderness melted me. There we were, just the two of us, kneeling in damp sand at a lakeshore at some ungodly hour. He was the eye to my storm. The most impossible of days in that hellhole were made bearable thinking that one day maybe I'd get to watch his mouth twitch into that barely perceptible smile.

He wasn't smiling now; his hands were grasping my cheeks and he was searching for something in the lines of my face. His eyebrows folded in worry. It was a look so foreign on his features that it startled me out of whatever horrified mindset I'd stumbled into and towarda completely different one.

I kissed him. Hard. Full on the mouth.

Although he moved his lips gently against mine, he was incredibly guarded—he kept his hands unmoving on my face, his passion kept locked behind some steel door. It was nearly a platonic kiss, and I knew his restraint was because he didn't want to trigger me again.

When he pulled back, I frowned in what must've been a comical way, because he laughed. I shook my head. "You're acting like you're afraid of me," I whispered.

He shook his head and curled a hand around my cheek, rubbing his thumb against my chilly skin. A little bit of pink had colored his face. His eyes were piercing, studying every inch of me as if my pores held life's deepest secrets. "Not possible."

He pulled me from the damp sand and together we walked up the slope of the beach. We sat next to each other, Fang back on his hands with his legs stretched out in front of him, me hunched over my bent knees.

I looked over the water and huffed a breath. Fang didn't touch me, but I knew he was watching me.

"Mallory was an early experiment of the School's," I began quietly.

If possible, the air went even more silent. Fang didn't move a muscle next to me.

"He was eight when we were born. Apparently, one of the employees there adopted him when he was six from an orphanage with the intent to use him in the name of science. A couple of years after we came around, they started messing with his DNA. He's not a hybrid, like us, but parts of him are mutated—something about the sodium-potassium pump and action potential and ATP and all sorts of other biochemistry that nobody in their right mind should understand."

I paused, waiting for Fang to speak, but he didn't. I couldn't bring myself to meet his eyes.

"He's incredibly strong, incredibly fast. Like us, but times ten."

Fang's hand formed a tight fist. He wasn't stupid; he could put two and two together, could recognize that those facts alone would've made it simple for Mallory to overpower me.

"He ran away when he was twelve, lived on the run. Got into a lot of trouble with the law, I guess, but never stuck around long enough to be caught. When he was twenty-two, he got shot in New York City during a gang fight. When he woke up, he was at Alcatraz, surrounded by scientists promising him a shot at a real life, a job, an explanation for who he was and why. He never looked back."

"Alcatraz?" Fang asked lowly.

"That's what I called it there," I shrugged, and took a steeling breath in an attempt to not panic. "Definitely felt like a maximum-security prison. They called themselves EU, I never found out what it meant."

Fang leaned forward to mimic my position, craning his head to look at me. I picked up a small pebble to my right and threw it toward the water, watching as it made a perfect parabola in the night.

"A few years later, enter: me. I don't know how they knew where to find us, I don't know why they only wanted me—but they did. Maybe they knew it'd be easier to control just one of us instead of all six, maybe they hoped you'd never look for me…"

Fang's eyes were burning when I finally met them. "We never gave up," he said quietly.

I offered him a tired but genuine smile. " _I_ know that. They always referred to me as the 'oldest, most successful' recombinant form. Either way… I'm glad it was just me." The thought of them trying to repair Iggy's vision, of lobotomizing Angel, of stealing Nudge's naivete…

Fang seemed to be chewing over something that he wanted to say. "Just ask it," I sighed.

He set his lips in a thin line. "The other night, you said it was less about science, more about torture and fascination."

I nodded. "They wanted to study me. It was just less… mad scientist, and more mad _man_."

Fang popped an eyebrow. One of his hands found my leg and he rubbed his thumb in a circle over the fabric of the sweatpants.

"After the fall of Itex, the School and others like it went completely under. People went to prison, some are on death row." Fang nodded. This was something we'd learned shortly after our return to the States five years ago. "EU saw an opportunity and opened up with entirely different staff, except for Mallory's adoptive father, who had spent years trying to find him and bring him back."

The blush that had come to Fang's cheeks was long gone, his olive skin now sallow in the moonlight. "The boss?"

"Bingo," I said. "Can't confirm it, but…"

"So they aren't as educated in recombinant life forms," Fang said.

"Right. They're just a bunch of sickos who loved cutting into dead cats in tenth grade science and lacked the job experience to get hired anywhere else." I shrugged. "Or maybe they _wanted_ that job. I wouldn't be surprised."

We were both silent for a minute, Fang finally tearing his eyes from me to look up at the moon and its reflection on the surface of the water. Most of the time, I still felt like I was having an out-of-body experience—the deepest parts of me hadn't quite caught up with the fact that I wasn't captive anymore—but right then, I was Maximum Ride, he was Fang, and it was almost as if we hadn't lost four years of time.

"They'll come for me," I reminded him. I had said it before, but the words hadn't gotten through to him and Iggy.

Fang shook his head. "Iggy and I talked about it. Highly illegal scientific building, full of whackos and torture. One of their prisoners escapes. What's the first thing _you_ would do?"

I pursed my lips. "I'm not a complete sociopath, though. What I would do doesn't matter."

"The School was cocky—but they had Itex behind them and half the government in their back pocket. From what you're saying, it sounds like this is some rag-tag team of biochemists. I'm willing to bet they'd expect you to go to authorities," Fang said. "Once we find out where they are, we'll call in an anonymous tip to the police station. They'll find them and shut it down."

I trusted Fang with my life. Sure, I was scarred from my time there, so I could understand why he might think I was just paranoid, but there was no way he could understand. "Fang—"

Fang gave me his frustrated smile, biting back the sigh I knew he wanted to let loose. "We aren't fourteen anymore—we're stronger, the kids are better fighters." I opened my mouth to protest, but he cut me off. "But Iggy and I are looking into some options. He's been talking to a coworker's realtor about putting the house on the market. It'd sell for a lot of money in an instant. We could uproot, go somewhere else. It's time for a change anyway."

I sensed the conversation was over for now, I just nodded, allowing another easy silence to wash over us.

"Our existence had just been a rumor to the boss, and most of the School, really," I told Fang. He craned his neck to look at me again. "That wing we were kept in was top-secret, separate from the majority of other experimentation. He never had confirmation that they'd successfully created human-avian hybrids. After the fall of Itex, rumors were confirmed by word of mouth through ex-Whitecoats. That's when he started hunting me. Once he had me, was less interested in the wings themselves and way more interested in what we were like on a cellular level."

"That's why they kept your wings bound to your back," Fang said quietly.

"Yep. They saw me as a flight risk."

Fang didn't smile.

"The first week or so they checked them out, forced me to fly, the whole bit. But from there on out, it was more about my cells having nuclei and my heart being one-and-a-half times bigger than a normal human heart, and what _exactly_ my rate of cell regeneration was…"

"How fast you could heal." Fang's words were tight and his jaw was set.

I nodded. "Turns out it slows down over time," I said with another half-hearted shrug. "Fractionally. Took them almost four years to figure that one out. I think, eventually, they ran out of stuff to uncover but kept up with the experimenting just because they were fucked up."

Fang looked away, drawing a circle in the sand with the tip of his finger. "And the pregnancy?" he asked, and the words drilled through me like a machine gun.

I rocked forward on to my feet and took a few steps toward the edge of the water, putting Fang a few feet behind me and to my right. I looked up at the moon, wondered what the ocean might look like tonight under the pull of its gravity.

I opened my mouth to tell him I wasn't ready to talk about it and then closed it, feeling incredibly stupid. Was I really that weak? How could I talk about everything I'd just told him, but not manage this one, minute detail? It should've paled in comparison to the rest of the story, but for some reason, I could not force it out.

A scared, small part of me feared that speaking it would make it true.

As if it weren't true already.

Fang stood next to me in the moonlight, threading his hand through mine. "It's okay," he said, shrugging one shoulder. He reached up a hand to tug at a strand of my hair. "We'll get there."

For the first time, I trusted that we would. And that was enough.

* * *

After we got back to the house, I slept like a baby. I didn't even wake up when Fang got out of bed to get the kids off to school.

I rolled into the kitchen around noon, probably resembling something typically found six feet under in a graveyard.

"It lives," said Iggy from his spot at the kitchen table. He had a cup of coffee and a braille copy of _The Catcher in the Rye_ in front of him.

I grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl and poured myself a cup of coffee. "Rolling my eyes."

Iggy hooked a thumb over his shoulder to indicate toward the living room, where Fang was supine, wings out, and fast asleep on the couch. His laptop was still open on his lap, some crooning voice and an acoustic guitar rolling quietly from the speakers. A warm feeling bubbled in my chest.

"He went for a fly after the kids left. Came back and was doing some research. Fell asleep a couple of hours ago, and I haven't had the heart to wake him up. He must look like hell. I was starting to think he'd never sleep again."

I gathered my apple and my coffee and sat next to Iggy at the table. "I'm guessing he told you about our talk last night," I said.

Iggy shrugged. "I asked where you guys went, and he told me you talked, but he wouldn't say what about. Just said that he thought getting some of that crap off your chest was why you were able to sleep like the dead all morning. And that he was going to start trying to figure out where you'd been all those years."

I sighed. Part of me wished that Fang would've just told Iggy everything so I wouldn't have to repeat myself, but a bigger part of me was flattered that he hadn't shared my secrets.

I recounted everything I'd told Fang the night before to Iggy, leaving out the very end of our conversation. Iggy responded with a nonchalant, low whistle that was entirely betrayed by his paled face. "Definitely can't imagine it'd be easy to sleep after that," he murmured, grasping my hand in his own for a moment before letting it go.

"Is that who you were seeing that night when you turned on Fang and I? Mallory?"

I cringed, both at the sound of his name and the memory of that night. "Yeah," I said, my voice suddenly hoarse.

Iggy's sky blue eyes narrowed a bit and one of his fists grasped the edge of the table so tightly I was afraid it'd splinter. "So that means he's the one who…"

"Not ready to talk about that just yet," I whispered back.

Both of us knew it was a yes, but Iggy didn't press the issue. Instead, he bit the inside of his cheek and closed his book. "When I get my hands on that guy…" he began in a warning tone, but he didn't finish. Instead, he shook his head and rose from his chair.

"Gotta get ready for work. Then I have a few days off. Maybe tomorrow I can show you the ledge Fang and I sometimes go to."

I smiled and reached for Iggy's hand a final time. He tapped the back of mine twice with his finger, an ancient gesture from the years we spent on the run. _Follow me. I'll keep you safe._ It had always been me protecting him, protecting all of them—and now it was the other way around.

"I'd like that," I told him.

Iggy had only been gone for maybe an hour when the landline rang.

Fang was in the middle of making sandwiches for lunch, so I answered it. Iggy was panicked on the other end.

"This is the second day in a row Cara has no-call no-showed," he said, wind whipping in the background. There was no way he was at work. "I assumed she called out sick yesterday, but just not showing up isn't like her. I'm taking my lunch break now and I'm on my way over to her place."

"Okay," I said slowly. I tried to figure out a polite way to ask why he was telling me all of this.

Fang must've been able to hear Iggy through the phone even across the room, because he turned, wiping his hands on his jeans. His face was dark. I put the phone on speaker.

"She was here three nights ago helping you. And now all of a sudden she hasn't shown up for work in two days? Something's up. Where are the kids?"

Fang looked at his watch. "Still at school. Angel won't be back for another hour or so. Nudge has Robotics Club again. Gazzy should be on his way home now."

"Iggy, they would've just come for me," I said quietly. "They wouldn't waste their time with—"

"Get out of there until you hear from me, okay?"

"Iggy—" I started, but Fang shook his head, already starting to shove our lunches into his backpack. I watched as he retreated up the stairs and wondered what was making him take Iggy so seriously.

" _Please_ ," Iggy said.

I puffed out a breath. "Okay. Why don't Fang and I go check out her place? That way you don't have to—"

"Max," Iggy said, voice steely. "Get out of the house until you hear from me. Go to the goddamn mall for all I care. Make sure the kids are safe, and don't come back to the house until I talk to you. Are we clear?"

This was a part of Iggy I'd never seen before, but I recognized the timbre of his voice and the tightness of his words from hearing them from myself: this was his Leader Voice. The stubborn part of me wanted to rebel against it, to remind him that I was free now, so nobody could demand that I do anything—but his anger was entirely out of concern, and Fang seemed to agree with him, so I folded. "Yes, Iggy. We're clear."

"Thank you," he breathed. "I'll call you back in five."

Upstairs, I could hear Fang talking on his cellphone quietly, but couldn't make out what he was saying. I climbed up the stairs and stood in his doorway, watching as he threw some cash and his wallet into his backpack. "Probably around five o'clock. Yes. Thank you." He hung up the phone.

"Gazzy's phone went to voicemail. Never charges it. We'll intercept him on our way out. I called Angel's school and told them to keep her after today, we can swing by and pick her up in a couple of hours."

"Assuming this is a real threat, you think she's safer there than with us?"

Fang nodded. "There are four middle schools in the area. Nobody's going to waste their time sifting through those if they know where we live."

"I think he's overreacting," I muttered. "If they decided to come for me, they'd come for _me._ "

"Maybe," said Fang, shrugging. "Excuse to get out of the house, though."

I turned and headed down the stairs and back into the kitchen. I opened Fang's bag and prodded through it, finding one of the sandwiches he'd bagged and stuffing half of it into my mouth. At this point, I'd mastered the art of eating again—my appetite was back with a vengeance.

I heard a slamming sound that I assumed to be the screen door. "Perfect timing, Gaz," I called out, cracking open a bottle of water from the fridge. "We're going—"

There was the _click_ of a gun's safety flipping off and the chill of its metal barrel against the back of my head. The landline started ringing, a tinkling chime that contrasted drastically with the terror growing at my core.

All at once, I felt incredibly, unbearably stupid.

A figure leaned over me. I was bent over the kitchen counter and my brain instantly sent a panic signal to every single nerve ending in my body. There was a voice at my ear. " _Max,_ " it drawled, and the smell of cigarettes buckled my knees, leaving me shit out of luck on the kitchen tile.

I heard Fang coming down the stairs, yelling that Iggy had just texted him, that we needed to go, his words full of worry. I was a million miles away, buried somewhere deep in the expansive nothingness that was my darkest nightmares.

The landline went to the answering machine. Iggy's voice, thick and high-pitched, flooded the kitchen. He was choking back sobs. "If anybody is home—get out of the house—they're coming after us—they found Cara. She's dead."

More soldiers from Alcatraz were flooding the kitchen, armed, massive, and stronger than Fang and I combined.

I knew we were done for.

Fang stopped at the base of the stairs and met my eyes, his own wider and more petrified than I had ever seen them. After a split second, he registered Mallory and the soldiers and launched himself towards where I was pinned to the cabinets.

Mallory raised his pistol—there was a _crack_ as he cocked it—and then a single silver bullet was spiraling through the air. I followed its path until it disappeared into Fang's abdomen. He hit the ground with a cry and tried to struggle to his feet—a soldier kicked him hard just below where he'd been shot—he hit the floor again, and there was blood, so much blood—

"Sweet dreams," Mallory cooed, and he slipped a bag over my head. I knew it was full of chloroform before the sickly sweet smell had infiltrated my brain.

This time, I didn't dream of torture.

I didn't dream at all.

* * *

Song: "Broken Bones" by Aqualung.

Sometimes, you write a chapter that you hate viscerally no matter how much editing, switching around, and squinting you do. This is that chapter. There is no way I will _ever_ be happy with it, so instead of putting it off longer with more useless editing and trying to fidget it around until I _am_ happy with it, I present it to you, imperfect.

Update: good Lord. I went to do some last-minute edits and add in the beginning part before I posted this, and half the chapter was gone. GONE. I panicked and scoured my computer and cloud before realizing that it was no use, I was going to have to rewrite the whole thing. By a stroke of luck, I managed to find it.


	10. Ten

_What has happened to it all? Crazy some will say  
Where is the life that I recognize? Gone away_

 _But I won't cry for yesterday, there's an ordinary world  
Somehow I have to find  
And as I try to make my way to the ordinary world  
I will learn to survive_

* * *

TEN

When I finally came to, the smell was so overwhelmingly familiar that I didn't even leap into a defensive crouch: I knew I was defeated already. So instead of wasting valuable energy on panicking, on trying to escape the inescapable, I simply opened my eyes to study the space I was in.

It was pitch black, but I knew the area well: it was a small room, one I had been in before, no bigger than twenty feet by twenty feet. Four cement walls, one incredibly heavy steel door. A one-way dog flap on the bottom that food would occasionally appear through. Iron loops along the wall on the right that chains or handcuffs could be hooked to. The sound of pipes running through the ceiling at times, although it was eerily silent now.

My head ached, as it did most times I woke up in this place. I ended up here by force ninety-nine percent of the time, and those who dragged me in were never exactly gentle. My injured wing ached. When I moved to stretch the feathers, I was unsurprised to find that my wings were bound to my back tightly with zip ties. I pulled as hard as I could at them despite knowing from experience that I'd never break them.

It had been a while since I'd been here. In my early days, this had been my living space. As the months dragged on and I realized I couldn't escape—and they realized that _I_ realized that—they granted me a bunker of sorts at the end of the hall.

The trembling started and once it did, it would not stop. I levered myself onto one shaky arm, squinting against the oppressive darkness. "Fang?" I called out, my voice feeble and scratchy.

Utter silence. Against every energy-conserving thought bouncing around my scattered brain, I started to hyperventilate.

They had shot him. They had shot him, he had started bleeding on the floor, and then I'd been knocked out. Then what? _Then what?_

I scurried to lean against the cold cement of the wall, folding myself over my knees and gasping to get enough oxygen. My hands were clammy and cold, but my back broke out into a thick sweat. "What did you do to him?" I forced out uselessly. As if anyone was around to tell me. As if, even if there was, somebody _would._

I don't know how much time passed; it was something akin to sensory deprivation, having absolutely no sense of sight, no sounds, and nothing but cold cement and my own body to touch. I walked along the walls, feeling each inch of them for some sort of way to escape, even though I knew from experience that there was nothing. I shoved myself as far into a corner as possible, willing all of this to be a complete nightmare. I banged on the door. I cried.

At some point, I'd curled up like a wounded cat in the corner farthest from the door, hands over my ears in a pathetic sort of fetal position.

When the barely-lit overhead lamp flicked on, I gasped at the pain to my retinas after being in the dark for so long. Even with the dim bulb shimmering, it was difficult to see who was coming through the door.

When I finally did, it was like breaking the surface of the water after being caught in an undertow. The relief was almost painful.

Two soldiers marched through the doorway dragging Fang between them, and a third brought up the rear with a shotgun level with his eye. I didn't need to test them to know it was loaded.

He was alive.

He looked awful, and he was here, but he was alive. His skin was pale and his eyes were half open. His shirt had been shredded at some point during the struggle, still covered in blood from the gunshot he'd sustained. The middle right part of his abdomen was heavily bandaged, sanguineous drainage staining the gauze taped to his skin.

A selfish wave of relief crashed over me. I wasn't alone. Fang was here. When Fang was around, things were going to be okay.

"Fang," I breathed. Fang's eyes shot wide open and found me in an instant. The third soldier waved the shotgun my way in warning, and I clamped my mouth shut.

At the sound of my voice, Fang perked up drastically—he struggled against the soldiers, clearly exerting his already exhausted body far more than he was prepared to. "Are you okay?" he panted, thrashing and twisting. His eyes swept up and down my crumpled figure. "What did they do to you?"

 _Nothing,_ I wanted to say. _What did they do to_ you _?_ But my voice was gone again. I was back here—my freedom had been a tease—I was back here again—

"I'll kill all of you," Fang snarled. Whatever color had returned to his face in rage was seeping away slowly as he lost energy. His struggle became more half-hearted. The soldiers snorted at his words.

"I'm sure you will," one of them droned. Both men threw him to the ground a couple of yards from me. He instantly sprang back to his feet and shuffled in front of me protectively, throwing his arms out wide. I saw his wings bulge a fraction against their confines. The bandage at his side got a little redder.

The third soldier raised his gun again, this time dead at the center of Fang's chest. "You're disposable," he said to Fang in a reminding tone. From what I could see of Fang's profile, it was clear he was deciding whether or not the soldier was bluffing.

I choked out half a cry, hating myself for being so weak. I wanted desperately to tell him how much danger he was in, resisting like he was—I wished I had told him every last detail of my time here. He wasn't prepared. There was no way he could be prepared.

Fang's head suddenly swiveled around the room, eyes narrowing as if searching for something in the dusky light. "Where is he?" he asked, voice dropping into a lethal spit.

"Don't know who you're talking about," said one of the soldiers coyly.

" _You know who I'm talking about,"_ Fang shouted. The sound reverberated off the walls like a dull roar. This was about as dangerous as he could get. Fang rarely raised his voice, but when he did, it was something to be afraid of. "Tell me!"

The soldier cocked the shotgun, staring down the barrel at Fang's chest.

A few things happened at once.

I unfroze from my spot on the ground, flinging myself forward to stand in front of Fang. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Fang reach forward for me. The soldier adjusted his killshot-aim directly to my heart. Behind me, Fang stilled. "Max—"

"He's disposable?" I tried to make my voice as much of a sneer as I could manage in my disheartened state. I was impressed with the results. "What about me? Am I disposable? Mallory's precious, one-of-a-kind Maximum Ride?"

The soldier didn't budge.

"Go ahead!" I shouted, hysteria creeping into my voice. Hot, fat tears sprung to the corners of my eyes. I blinked rapidly to try to keep them contained. "You took everything else, why not my life? _Shoot me!"_

"Acton," said the shorter of the two other soldiers. I recognized him. I could tell he was trying to hide the nervousness from his voice. "Lower the gun."

He—Acton—adjusted the shotgun a couple of inches, aiming somewhere over my shoulder. I stepped backward, nearly bumping into Fang.

"Do you know how fast my reflexes are?" I spat. "Because I'll show you. I will take that bullet _so fast._ If you want any chance of me cooperating, you will put the gun down and never threaten his life again."

For a moment, Acton and I stared each other down. I could feel my strength waning, but just as I was certain he'd outlast me, he lowered the shotgun and turned on his heel.

"You missed dinner," Acton called over his shoulder casually as he stomped out the door. The two other soldiers followed behind him.

At my back, Fang flinched like he was going to make a move for the exit—I held out two fingers behind me. _Wait._ He had no chance.

They would shoot him again and aim to kill this time.

The door closed, but dim overhead light stayed on. Fang sprinted to the closed door, running his hands along each crease in the metal. He banged his fists a couple of times before hanging his head. His eyes then traced the ceiling and finally all four walls.

I backed up slowly until I felt the cool cement of the wall against my back and slid slowly to the floor, dumping my head atop my knees again.

Fang gave up on looking for an escape route and turned his attention to me, eyes wild like a starving animal's.

"Did they hurt you?" Fang asked, kneeling at my side with a hand on my shoulder. I made myself take a couple of huge breaths. _Do not panic. Do not panic._

"Max?" he asked, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. His blue-black gaze was absolutely blazing. "If they touched you, I swear to God…"

I pulled my head back up, my best leader face painted on as thick as I could manage. I shook my head firmly. "I'm fine. Let me look at that," I said, gesturing to the bandage at his side.

Fang looked down as if he'd forgotten he'd been shot. "It just grazed me," he said, waving an arm off. "I woke up in the medical wing, I'm—"

I ripped off the ends of the sweatpants of his I was wearing, folding them into something vaguely resembling gauze. "Lay back," I demanded. "I will not have you bleeding out in this dungeon."

"Max," he said quietly. "This is the least of my concerns right now."

"Yeah, well, it's the most of mine. Lay. Back."

Doing something physical was good. Keeping my hands busy was good. Sitting around with Fang asking me every fifteen seconds if I was okay and staring at me like I was back in the dilapidated prison that had kept me for four years—which I was—was entirely counterproductive.

He read the expression on my face and settled back on the ground, pulling up his ragged shirt to expose the saturated bandage.

"They're not going to give us more dressing supplies, so this will have to go back on until one of the medics changes it." Gently, I peeled the paper tape back, revealing a wound about two inches in diameter that had, at one point, been stitched completely shut. The middle half-inch had split open.

Fang sucked in a breath as I studied the wound. We'd had much deeper wounds that had never been stitched shut—for all the testing they did on me, they still had a lot to learn. "Ripped stitches," I said, applying pressure on his side. "Should heal fine on its own."

Laying on the floor, he still looked sallow, but altogether much less like he might faint at any minute.

"Why would they take you?" I said, more to myself than anyone else.

"Buy one get one?" Fang said drily, wincing as I peeled back the fabric to inspect my progress. He leaned up on his forearms to inspect the injury, abdominal muscles tensing as he did. The wound was still weeping a bit, so I applied more pressure.

"He shot you," I said, shaking my head in disbelief. "Why would he shoot you just to bring you back here, treat you, and then lock you up with me?"

"Why would any of these people do what they do?"

It was rhetorical. I answered him anyway. "Because they can," I whispered.

I reapplied the paper tape and wrapped one of the clean strips of fabric over the dressing and around his middle, cinching it tightly. He sat up all the way, massaging one of his knees with his knuckles.

"The skin will close by tomorrow," he said, once again trying to play down the fact that _he'd been shot_. "Where have you been all this time?"

"In here," I said. "They had the lights out. I think I started to go crazy."

Fang's face was stony. "Have you seen Gazzy?"

My heart stopped and then restarted at a sprint. Gazzy wasn't here. Gazzy was back at the house. That's why I hadn't seen Gazzy. "What do you mean, have I seen Gazzy?"

Fang gritted his teeth so tightly together that he actually showed them, perfect rows of chiclets beneath his split lip. The unhinged part of me remembered the days he'd bared his canines in an attempt to scare off the whitecoats from all of us; how he'd used his teeth as a defense mechanism.

"He heard the gunshots from the deck, I think. After they chloroformed you, he tried to use the element of surprise, threw a couple of smoke bombs, but they overpowered him. I passed out at some point after that."

He was wringing his hands together again. "So he's here," I said unnecessarily.

"Has to be," he said. He looked around the room again and then back at me. "This is my fault."

"What—?"

"I really didn't think they'd come back. It's been six years since Itex fell. Six. This copycat lab pops up, they imprison and torture a girl for four years, and when she escapes, they don't worry for a _second_ that she'll out them?"

I was suddenly so, incredibly exhausted. "I don't know. The boss obviously knew we didn't do that after escaping the School."

He looked like he wanted to say more, but decided against it. The look of self-depreciation he'd mastered in my time away clouded his already shadowy features.

Fang stood and walked over to the door, favoring his right side just a bit. He had a hand wrapped over his wound.

"There's no way out," I said tiredly as he began inspecting the steel door for the nth time. He looked over his shoulder at me. "I've been here before. Several times."

He turned back to the door, leaning his forehead against it. "How big is this place?"

"Pretty big," I answered. "We're in the front wing. There's a big rec room at the end of this hall where they do physical tests. Medical wing is a little further past it. Some testing rooms there. Offices past there, I think. A couple of boarding rooms. They kept me there towards the end."

Fang's shoulders were hunched. Every facet of his body language indicated that he was defeated. He looked up again, studying where the top of the door met the wall. "We will get out of here," he said. I'm not sure which of us he was trying to convince. Maybe it was both of us.

A gnawing sort of unease had settled over me. "Fang, I spent four years trying to break out of here."

"You succeeded once. Very recently."

"That was a freak accident," I breathed. "Right place, right time, right circumstance—"

"We're freaks, and accidents happen." I bit back the frustrated scream I wanted to let loose. Fang sensed my impatience and changed his tone. "You're not alone this time."

I shook my head. "They're stronger than us. Stronger than _you._ Faster."

"We've had worse odds."

I sighed and dumped my head into my hands. Fang stalked back from the door and paced in front of where I sat against the far wall.

"Iggy knows something's wrong," he said.

With that, I wilted a bit further. "Oh, no," I lamented.

Fang stopped pacing, eyes boring into me. "What?"

"His friend," I said quietly. "What was her name?"

A flicker of recognition lit Fang's eyes. He frowned. "Cara," he said.

"Cara," I parroted. "Oh, God…"

Fang knelt in front of me, hands on my shoulders, trying to force me to make eye contact. "Breathe," he said. I realized I'd started hyperventilating again.

"Another person dead, because of me," I choked out, pressing a hand to my chest. My heart was running the steeplechase.

"Can't think like that," he said quietly. He tipped my chin up with one giant hand, squeezing my cheeks as he did. "Stop. Don't think about that right now. Iggy will find us."

"How long did you spend looking for me?" I challenged, my voice gaining a bit of strength. I couldn't handle his optimism—he hadn't been here, he didn't understand. "We don't even know where we are."

"This place got lucky the first time," he said through gritted teeth. His boots scuffled against the cement floor as he resumed pacing. "There's no way they didn't leave some sort of a trail."

The sound of heavy footsteps echoed outside the door. Fang pivoted to stand in front of me again, arms wide at his sides, as if he could possibly protect me from anything that this place could throw at us.

As the footsteps got closer, he changed his tactic, advancing through the room to stand at the side of the doorway. "Fang," I whispered urgently, "don't—"

He held a finger to his lips and crouched as if he were ready to attack.

The door slid open, and Fang was able to take half a step towards the intruder before Mallory's massive hand was wrapped around his throat. "Stop!" I screamed, struggling to get to my feet quickly enough.

It was pointless. Mallory had Fang at least a foot off the ground by the neck, and he carried him across the room toward the iron loops in the walls. Fang was kicking his feet feebly, hands moving up to claw at his neck, face turning blue—I thought of how, just days before, I'd done the same to him in our living room, and he'd let me choke him so as not to overpower me with his strength—

Mallory used his free hand to lock an iron cuff around Fang's ankle. At the end of a three-foot chain was another iron cuff, and he hooked this one to the wall. He dropped Fang to the ground unforgivingly.

Fang sputtered for air, both hands coming to his neck to massage his windpipe. His face changed back to its normal color and he launched forward against his restraint, gasping as his ankle pulled backward on the chain.

His breathing was ragged, but he continued to struggle as Mallory turned towards me. "Get away from her!"

I scurried against the wall, trying to put myself closer to Fang and further from Mallory. I ended up in the corner, ten feet or so from Fang, who had stretched his body as far as he could against the chain. He reached a hand out toward me, eyes wild and tortured as Mallory approached.

Fang was inconsolable, face red as he shouted in a way I'd never heard him do before. I could hear his voice but couldn't process what he was saying.

Mallory, with a steel-toed boot, stomped on Fang's outstretched hand.

My vision tunneled as he approached me, Fang's howl of pain rocketing off the walls like a firework. I backed myself as far as I could into the corner, wishing I could shrink and climb in between the cracks of the wall.

"Welcome home," he said. The sliminess of his voice sent a shiver down my spine. My breathing quickened and a ball of nausea settled at the pit of my stomach.

"You must've known you wouldn't stay gone for long," he continued. He stopped and stood at his full height in front of me, peering down at my collapsed form. A wicked smile came to his lips.

One of his hands reached down and grabbed mine, flinging me to my feet roughly. He pushed me into the wall and pinned my arms above me with one of his hands. I tried to free myself but could not even budge against his grasp.

My brain shut down. It was a defense mechanism I hadn't asked for but was grateful to have. Fang was nearly purple from screaming and pulling against the chain—one of Mallory's fingers traced the curve of my cheek to the bottom of my chin—I knew the ugly hazel-green of his eyes; the color of crabgrass, the color of seaweed. The color of vomit. My heart hammered in my chest.

His face was inches from mine, his ashy, revolting scent rolling over me in waves. His greasy black ponytail was dumped over one shoulder. "A little birdie told me," he began, tapping my bottom lip with his finger, "that we did the impossible." He smiled that crooked, fucked up smile, teeth yellowed from too much nicotine and chewing tobacco.

I jerked my head to the side, trying to calm my breathing. At this rate, I was going to pass out from lack of oxygen.

 _We did the impossible._

A bolt of utter dread ripped through me like a lightning bolt. He knew that I'd been pregnant.

 _How?_

"Don't touch her!" Fang's voice broke through the bubble Mallory had created.

In a moment of bravery, I lifted a knee as fast as I could, aiming for between his legs. I don't know what I hoped would happen—there was no way I could actually hurt him—but he dodged my attack swiftly, positioning his body flush to mine, pinning me against the wall.

"Stubborn," Mallory said at my neck. "We know where you family is. And we have the blonde boy. He's alive. If you want to keep it that way, I suggest you cooperate."

Gazzy.

"Don't you dare hurt him," I whispered, trying to channel my terror into anger. "You have me. Don't hurt him."

Mallory's lips dusted over my throat; he parted them and nipped at my carotid. Fang was still struggling against his restraints ten feet away. "I have you." He repeated my words, and I felt his lips curl to a smile. "Don't forget it."

The door slid open behind us, but Mallory didn't move from his position against me. "Sir," said one of the soldiers, addressing him formally, as they always did. "You're needed up front."

Mallory's free hand ran along my chin again, tipping my head forward. He said something—his lips moved—but I couldn't hear him, not over my pulse rushing like a waterfall in my ears. That free hand came up to my neck, finding the carotid artery on either side, and before the spots even filled my vision, I knew exactly what he was doing.

Fang was yelling in a panicked voice, but I was a thousand miles away, dancing the line of unconsciousness as Mallory lowered me, limp as a corpse, to the dusty ground.

* * *

Max's body hit the ground like a sack of flour, and the deranged part of Fang was certain she was dead.

Mallory turned on his heel, slid the door open, and was gone. Several seconds later, the lights cut, plunging the two of them into darkness.

"Max," Fang panted. He pulled with every single ounce of strength he had against the cuff on his ankle. "Max—"

He dragged himself across the dusty floor on his stomach, ignoring the fiery pain in his abdomen and the definitely crushed bones of his left hand. Stretched to his full six-feet-whatever, with a long arm as far over his head as he could reach, he could just dust his fingers against the cool skin of Max's wrist.

He jostled her forearm, desperate for some sort of confirmation that she was alive. If she was dead—if Mallory had killed her—

He bit his lip to force back the obsessive thoughts that he knew would take over him. _Keep it together._

"Max?"

In the silence, Fang heard a ragged breath, and then another. The tension in his body unraveled just a bit. She was alive. Her pulse danced under his fingertips. Unconscious, but alive.

He rubbed his thumb in circles against her skin and allowed his forehead to drop against the cold floor.

"Come on, Iggy," he said.

* * *

Song: "Ordinary Day" by Duran Duran, cover version by Joy Williams.

I realize this chapter is shorter—I wanted to get an update out and also want to start fresh with the next chapter. I've finally finalized (I think) where I want this story to go. I'm not the type to thoroughly plan out my writing; I kind of let ideas come to me and write as I go. This is probably part of why I'd never have success as an author, or really any other career that involves long-term planning. Flying by the seat of my pants, over here.

A couple of people commented that they didn't think this would be so fast-moving, and I'm glad! Like I said above—I'll never be an author—and most of my fics were typically short back in the day when I wrote, so they moved. I'm not sure how long this one will be—we've definitely got a ways to go.


	11. Eleven

_White night, one night I left you; one time, one time I knew you_  
 _Now I draw lines through; through you, can't help but hate you_

 _Yeah, I'm coming out of my cave to find truth_  
 _Yeah, I'm summing up my time in my young youth_  
 _And I'm picking up the pace of the thrill,_  
 _I'm listening to the emptiness I feel_

* * *

ELEVEN

I woke to the sound of hyperventilating.

There had been a voice murmuring, but it had gone silent as soon as the panting started. It was incredibly confusing. Even more so when I realized it was _me_ hyperventilating.

I clamped both hands over my mouth, scuffling backwards until my back hit the wall. I knew I was in that same room—cement, huge door, iron loops in the walls—but I was completely disoriented by the total absence of light. There had been voices, I knew there had been voices, and I struggled to put together why I was here and who I was with.

"Max," came Fang's voice through the darkness. The way the breath whooshed out of him suggested he'd been holding it. "You're okay," he said, as if trying to convince me.

Under different circumstances, I probably would've snorted at his word choice, but I was still too discombobulated.

"Are you hurt?" he asked quietly, urgently.

"Where are you? How long was I out?" I asked, slowing my breathing with great effort. I rubbed a hand over my forehead, trying to force away the pounding headache that I'd woken up with. I tested each of my joints, satisfied to confirm that nothing was broken or knocked out of place.

"Few hours, I think. Over here."

I followed the sound of his voice, scooting along the wall and feeling blindly in front of me. My cool fingers bumped into his thigh, grazing over something soft and silky in his lap.

"What—?"

"Gazzy," he murmured. One of his hands reached out to grab mine while the other continued to smooth over the Gasman's hair. "Sleeping. They brought him in an hour or so ago."

Every single part of me, however fractured deep down by how absolutely fucked up my life was, yearned to gather Gazzy into my arms and crush him as hard as humanly possible to my chest. But something in Fang's voice was off.

He knew me so well, I didn't even need to ask. "He's fine. Just tired. They…" he sighed, taking the hand that had been in Gazzy's hair and dragging it through his own. He sighed heavily.

" _What?"_

"They did surgery on him," Fang said. "Exploratory laparotomy."

I blanched and drew in a quick breath. His hand squeezed mine. I could picture his eyes, how intense they must be, all dilated pupils and controlled rage.

"They did one of those on me, early on," I muttered, my hand fluttering to my abdomen. The scar was still there—white and faded, but long and thick, right down the center of my abdomen from just below my ribcage to a few inches below my navel. I remembered the pain I'd felt the first few days afterwards as my muscles healed, the dull tug of the stitches with every single movement I made.

"They already know what our insides look like. They saw mine. Why would they do one on him?"

The hand that had taken mine rose to cup my face. Leaning into his warmness helped my panic subside a couple of notches. "I guess he tried to throw them off back at the house with his… trademark. They must've taken him into surgery right after they finished with me in the hospital wing. He overheard them saying he had scar tissue in his small intestine from earlier experiments at the School. They think that's what caused his digestive issues."

"Adhesions," I breathed. "Lysis of adhesions. They did one of those on me too. My shoulder. I had scarring in the muscles, from the gunshot in Arizona." My free hand moved from my abdomen to the fleshy area over my scapula. There was a scar there, too, I knew.

"He dropped you, earlier," Fang said. "You went down like a ton of bricks."

"It's called the baroreceptor reflex. When you put pressure on both carotid arteries at once..." I gestured vaguely in the air. "One of his favorite tricks. Would've been good to know back during Eraser fights, huh?"

Fang had switched his hold on my cheek for my hand again, and he guided it to rest over what I assumed was a large gauze pad on the Gasman's stomach. I could feel the ridges of sutures underneath and the warmth of healing tissues. His stomach rose and fell with his peaceful breathing.

I drew my hand back and Fang smoothed Gazzy's shirt back down.

Fang brushed his shoulder against mine, and I lolled my head to rest on it. "I heard talking," I said. "Before."

My head bobbed as he shrugged. "I was talking to him."

"He's asleep."

"I'm aware," Fang said. "But it took him a while to get there. He was terrified, in a lot of pain. I started running my hands through his hair, like you used to when he was little."

I closed my eyes against the blackness, letting the severity of the situation roll over me. Gazzy had just undergone major surgery, subjecting him to about a thousand potential complications. Fang had been shot in the abdomen.

And I was back with my captor.

Fang must've sensed the change in the air, because he rolled his shoulder a bit against my cheek. "We're going to get out of here," he said.

We stayed like that, Fang leaning back against the wall heavily, my head on his shoulder and the Gasman's head in his lap. After a long while, Fang's breathing evened out—he must've been exhausted, having dealt with me the past few nights, having been shot, looking out for Gazzy… it was alarming, actually, how little sleep he'd probably gotten.

I was wide awake, though; I hardly ever slept here. The rush of water through the pipes above us started, eerie and distant. I leaned a bit further into Fang.

Mallory had come to the house around three o'clock when he'd taken us. Then I'd woken up in this room alone for an entirely undetermined number of hours. Fang had been taken in, we'd talked briefly, Mallory had come in, and then I'd been out again for a few hours.

Add in the fact that I had no idea how long it'd taken Mallory to get us here in the first place—because I had _no freaking clue where this place was—_ it was impossible to figure out how long we'd been here. Three days? Less than one?

I thought about Iggy in his lavender scrubs, finding Cara dead in her apartment and then coming home to find his house in what must've been shambles, then realizing the Gasman wasn't home from school, going to get Nudge and Angel and recognizing the danger that they were in. That _we_ were in, being here.

They would search for us, I knew for a fact. Every fiber of my being was confident that they had immediately started brainstorming and scouring for leads.

But how would they even know where to start?

My head throbbed worse. I focused on Fang's near-silent inhales and exhales, centering myself in the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed.

After what must've been a couple of hours of an endless cycle of panicking and forcing myself to calm down, there was a rustling noise to my left; a low groan revealed that the Gasman was awake.

"Hey," I said lowly, and I felt the air around us shift as he startled. "Just me."

He groaned again. I heard more shuffling and realized he was crawling from Fang to me. With a sigh, he dumped his head in my lap.

I shoved a hand in his thick, curly hair, gently scratching his scalp. I felt him relax a bit.

"I won't let them touch you," he said fiercely, and my heart swelled with pride.

"Max?" he said after a moment of silence, sounding so much like the four-year-old that I'd rocked to sleep every night for a year after Jeb busted us out of the School. In the darkness, I imagined his blue-sky eyes, wide with fear and pain and stunted bravery. Fourteen years old and he'd seen enough for several lifetimes.

"It hurts," he whimpered, voice small.

I heard Fang adjust the slightest bit and realized he'd probably woken up when Gazzy shifted from his lap to mine. He didn't move, didn't give any indication that he'd heard the break in the tough exterior the Gasman had developed at a young age for the sake of his sister, for the sake of all of us.

"I know, sweetie," I whispered. My heart broke into a million pieces for him. Fang's fingers ghosted over my elbow as if to say, _I'm here._ "I know."

* * *

At some point, I fell asleep like that.

What woke me up initially was the overhead light. Before I had time to blink the sleep out of my eyes and get into a defensive position, the door was sliding open, then shut, and a Taser was in my face. One of the soldiers from earlier—the one I'd recognized—stood over me, his features impassive.

"Follow me," he said.

"But, _mom,_ " I whined, "five more minutes?"

He gritted his teeth and adjusted his finger against the Taser, but seemed to change his mind at the last second, pointing it toward where Fang had shuffled himself in front of the Gasman.

"Come on," I snarled, totally bluffing. "You think I think he can't take a Taser?"

The soldier, instead, shoved Fang back with his superstrength and grabbed the Gasman from his spot huddled against the wall. He dragged Gazzy out of Fang's reach and held the Taser close to his chest.

Gazzy was paler than I'd ever seen him, eyes huge and shining like full moons against the dark circles beneath them. "Okay," I submitted. Fang looked positively rabid next to me, struggling against his ankle cuff again. "Okay, leave them alone, okay."

Fang immediately protested. "Max—"

The soldier grabbed one of my hands roughly, snapping a pair of handcuffs around my wrists before leading me from the room. I knew, to Fang, it was unlike me to go without a fight to the death. But I also knew this superhuman could break me in half like a popsicle stick with one hand tied behind his back.

"Max!" Fang called, and I looked over my shoulder.

The door slid shut, leaving Fang's tortured face burning against the back of my eyelids.

* * *

Charlie—I'd finally remembered his name—led me down the long hall, holding my cuffed hands behind me as he marched me toward some torturous unknown.

When we passed the rec room, I stole a glance in—a few of the soldiers were sparring. A young girl I'd never seen before was up against one in the far corner. She looked unpracticed and scared, and he wasn't going easy on her.

The dirty blonde ringlets that bounced around her face in addition to her long, slim figure reminded me so much of Angel, it was almost physically painful. She couldn't have been older than seven, but there she was, getting the stuffing kicked out of her by a man four times her size.

"Let me guess, you guys offered her candy?"

The soldier looked down at me and followed my line of sight just as we passed the doorframe. His lips were in a tight line.

"Having kindergarteners fight for you? That's getting pretty low," I commented.

He shoved me forward a bit but didn't say anything.

We reached the end of the hallway and he guided me into the medical wing, a horrible succession of rooms I'd come to associate with anesthesia and scar tissue. My whole body locked up with tension as the smell hit me, bleach and sterile fields and surgical scrubs.

Against my better judgment, I started fighting the handcuffs and Charlie's cold hands. Gruffly, he shoved me onto an exam table, wrestling me onto my back and strapping a leather restraint over my chest. He cinched it tightly and the breath whooshed out of me.

This was when the panic started setting in again—being in this place was bad enough, but being so tightly strapped in and unable to move forced my breaths to come more quickly. Spots littered the corners of my vision—I couldn't budge under the bite of the leather—

"They just want an ultrasound," Charlie said so quietly under his breath that I thought I might've imagined it. The sideways look he gave me confirmed that it was him who'd said it.

"Yeah, well, tell them they can bite me," I spat.

A man in powder blue scrubs approached me, a mask over his face and thick gloves on his hands. He didn't say anything—they never did, in this room—as he pulled up the hem of my long sleeve. I squirmed underneath him, all too familiar with the sensation of a stranger tugging at my clothes.

Over the mask, his eyes portrayed some sort of sympathy. I'd noticed quite a few of these medical techs give me looks like that. _Then do something,_ I used to scream at them. _You don't have to be here. You don't have to do this._

I stopped when I realized that maybe they did.

He smeared some of the ultrasound jelly over my abdomen and pressed the probe to me, reading something on a screen that I couldn't see. I knew what he was looking for. I wasn't stupid, and they'd done it enough times over my four years here that I was well aware of what was happening.

 _Not going to find anything,_ I wanted to say. _Wasting your time._ I wondered if I was supposed to be mourning, if I was supposed to feel sad. I didn't feel anything.

After several minutes of me hyperventilating and the med tech pushing low on my belly with the wand, he jotted a couple of notes down on a chart, wiped my abdomen clean, gave me one last pitying look, and walked away.

I was left belly-up on the exam table, still handcuffed at the wrists and ratcheted down by leather restraints over my chest and legs. Trying to slow my breathing, I started counting the tiles in the ceiling, thinking about the thousands of ways I'd dropped the ball on this.

I should've never gone home, for one. I should've gotten so far away from anywhere that could've been traced back to me—traced to _any_ of the flock—and lived in solidarity for the rest of my miserable, mutant life.

Looking back on that night, I really hadn't even planned on going back to the house; my body sort of went on an autopilot and took me there. With the detached state I'd been in, it wouldn't really have been possible for me to go elsewhere.

There was a slam. I craned my neck up from the table, jarred from my reverie, and sought the source.

Mallory was hovering over me with one hand clasped around my neck before I'd even registered that he was the one who'd slammed the door open. "What did you do?" he seethed. His eyes were fiery with a deep, powerful hatred. I could barely hear him over the rushing of blood in my ears.

I was still tied to the table and my hands were still cuffed, but I couldn't breathe—I could feel my trachea struggling for air, narrow and bruised, under his giant hand. I thrashed this way and that—spots freckled my vision—

"Sir," came a low voice from behind him. Suddenly, the pressure on my throat was gone. I choked in a painful breath, wheezing as oxygen flooded my lungs.

"Charlie," grunted Mallory. "You can see yourself out, I'm sure."

Charlie shifted on his feet, eyes darting from my squirming form gulping for air to Mallory's murderous body language. "I don't want you to do anything you might regret," he said quietly.

Mallory scoffed and took a step toward Charlie. Mallory was built tall and tough, but Charlie might've had an inch or so on him. To his credit, he didn't cower before the sturdier man. "There's a reason I'm second in command here," said Mallory.

Charlie didn't miss a beat. "We're all aware. But she isn't your punching bag."

I couldn't help it—my jaw dropped open. In four years of dealing with this place and fourteen total of dealing with captivity and mad scientists, not one had ever stuck up for me besides Jeb.

Mallory picked up the chart the medic had written on and shoved it in Charlie's face, teeth bared like an angry dog. "Did you see _this?_ The boss has been trying to breed her for years. _Years_. In vitro failed dozens of times. She finally conceives naturally—carries _my child—_ and is out of my sight for a few days and _this_ is what she comes back with."

"It's ridiculous that you'd ever assume she was pregnant in the first place," said Charlie, shrugging off the chart. "Boss already figured out that it wasn't possible—the anatomy is too—"

"I found the nurse who treated her and... convinced her to give me some information." Mallory wore a crooked grin as the words slinked out from between his lips.

I jerked against the restraints. "Whatever she said was a lie," I said, trying to keep a note of panic from bleeding into my voice. "She told you what you wanted to hear. She knew you were going to kill her."

Mallory turned and smiled that horrible incandescent-light smile straight at me. "I don't think so. I can be very persuasive when I need information."

A million possibilities of what he could've done to this innocent woman shot through my brain so fast that I almost vomited right there. "You're sick," I forced out, my voice just barely higher than a whisper. "You are twisted, and sick, and sad."

Mallory snorted and nodded at Charlie, who started uncinching the ties holding me to the table. "So tame. I remember when you first got here, you were this firecracker. What happened?"

He was taunting me, and I knew it. Of course I wasn't like how I'd been at first. Initially, this was just another stint of captivity—I knew I'd get free eventually. The flock would find me, or somebody would slip up, or something.

Slowly but surely, that sense of optimism drained from me as I realized that, no, I was not going to be found, and, no, nobody was going to slip up. I still tried to maintain that fire that made me who I was, but it got to a point where I barely had enough energy to blink enough times to keep my eyes from falling out.

Charlie silently led me out of the room and back down the long hallway. When we passed the rec room, I saw that young girl again—this time she was curled on the mat, not moving. I jerked against his hold and he startled long enough for me to sprint into the room, cuffed hands trailing behind my back.

I threw myself to my knees next to her. Her eyes popped open, a beautiful chestnut brown that reminded me so much of Nudge. A bruise was beginning to shadow on her right cheek, and there was a large gash over the bridge of her nose. She was beautiful.

"Don't give up," I said hurriedly. Charlie was tearing toward me, and a couple of other soldiers on the far end of the rec room had noticed that I'd busted free of him. "Whatever you do, don't give up—we will get out of here."

Charlie roared up behind me and forced me to my feet, dragging me away from where the girl lay on the mat. Her eyes followed us. I saw them settle on Charlie with a look I couldn't quite decipher.

"Un-fucking-believable," I seethed when we were back in the hallway. I rolled my shoulders and tried to meet Charlie's eyes with my own. "That little girl is left alone, beaten to shit, and you can just walk on by?"

We reached the big metal door to the cement room. Charlie unclipped my handcuffs and spun me by the shoulders—

—And looked down at me with that same pair of beautiful chestnut brown eyes.

I sucked in a sharp breath and stumbled back into the door. He slid it open, his cold exterior melting to something much more tortured underneath.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Fang rocket to his feet, moving as far toward the door as his chain would allow. "Max—"

"Her name is Allie," said Charlie, and the door slid shut in my face.

* * *

Song: "White Night" by Hayden Calnin

I realize it was an absurdly long wait. Lost a patient at work unexpectedly and am burning out hard at my job. I work in an ICU, so death isn't exactly a stranger to me, but sometimes you lose a favorite that really looked like they would make a full recovery, and it's tough. Even tougher when you're the one doing CPR trying to bring them back.

More relevantly, I got SO stuck about 2000 words into this chapter. I have several later chapters written completely and am so happy with them, but am having tough time with this little stretch. Bear with me, beautiful people.


	12. Twelve

_Then that light, it's your eye  
I know, I swear, we'll find somewhere the streets are paved with gold  
Bullets fly, split the sky; but that's all right  
Sometimes, sunlight comes streaming through the holes_

* * *

TWELVE

"What happened?" demanded Fang. His lanky form was still only visible out of the corner of my eye as I stared at the door that had shut in my face.

I composed my expression and turned to face him. Dark circles had started forming under his eyes, but he still looked prepared to punch any and everything that even so much as looked at him the wrong way.

"Alright?" he asked when I didn't answer. He was stretched out against that restraint again, still leaving almost ten feet of space between us. "Come over here."

My bare feet slapped against the cold floor as I slowly backed toward him, mind still reeling from what I'd just seen. My mind flashed back to years ago, meeting the Griffiths on their front stoop and immediately _knowing_ that Iggy was theirs—the resemblance was uncanny.

Allie was Charlie's daughter. But it didn't make sense.

I bumped into Fang's front. I saw his arms twitch as they came around my midsection from behind; he reconsidered and dropped a hand on my shoulder instead.

"I'm fine." The fragility of my voice surprised me. "They just did an ultrasound."

"That's it?"

"Fang," I repeated, more sternly. "I'm fine."

His other hand found my other shoulder and he spun me to face him, looking down at me with calculating, severe eyes. I knew the look so well I could practically paint it from memory—it was the _seriously, are you okay?_ look he reserved for the most serious of situations.

"I'm not going to repeat myself."

He sighed and dropped a hand from my shoulder to the small of my back, taking a step backward to allow me to pass in front of him. "What was that all about?"

"His daughter is here," I breathed, meeting his gaze.

Fang's eyes widened a fraction. "Who?" When I didn't answer, his eyes flicked to the door. He pointed at it. "That guy?"

"They have the same eyes," I mumbled. "Exactly the same. And the way she looked at him—and he _knew_ that I knew—"

"Hold on," Fang said, worry seeping through his usually well-kept mask. "Back up."

"They took me for an ultrasound," I repeated, frustrated. "On the way there, we passed the rec room, there was this little girl fighting some huge guy—I made a comment, but he didn't say anything, but then on the way back I ran over to her and she had these huge, brown eyes. And he has the same ones, Fang."

It all sort of came out in one breath and Fang looked entirely unconvinced that I still had all of my marbles. "He stood up for me, in the hospital wing," I continued. "Charlie. The tall one. Mallory was being an asshole, and Charlie told him I wasn't his punching bag."

Fang's eyes drilled into me. I knew his mind was racing, could practically hear it from where I stood a couple of feet away. "Think he's a good guy?"

"Don't know how he wouldn't be if his _kid_ is here…"

"Jeb kept Ari at the School. And then left him there, even after he busted us out," Fang pointed out.

I shook my head. "This is different. Plus, I never saw her in my four years here. Ever. Not once."

"I'm guessing you didn't get out much," he said quietly, gesturing vaguely to our surroundings.

I ignored him and instead settled against the Gasman's drowsy form on the ground; he was still trying to overpower the remains of the anesthesia, eyes half-open as Fang and I talked over him. "Sleep," I instructed him. I knew when the fog lifted, he'd be in for a world of pain that would absolutely not be managed or even at all treated.

"'m fine," he mumbled, trying to force those baby blues alert. He pushed himself onto one forearm, eyes struggling to focus on anything in his foreground. His gaze trailed lazily from where I sat next to him to where Fang stood, arms crossed, in front of us. "Wanna help."

"You can help by sleeping," I said.

"Wait," he slurred, swaying a bit from where he'd propped himself up. "They're mad."

"Yes," I said impatiently. It was making me anxious, just the fact that he was still awake. He needed to sleep, needed to recover. "They typically—"

"No," Fang said, holding out a hand in front of me. "What do you mean, Gaz?"

"'bout the baby. That you lost it."

A shiver rippled through me. I knew that he knew, of course—based on the circumstances, they hadn't had a choice but to tell Gazzy and Angel. It was different, though, to hear him say it. It made me feel more vulnerable, somehow.

Also, his reference to it as a _baby—_ it hadn't been that, right? Cara had only said a few weeks, that was hardly grounds for giving it as grandiose a title as a _baby._

"Yeah," I said quietly, bobbing my head. "They just made that pretty clear."

Gazzy shook his head drowsily. "I heard them talking about it, before my surgery. They thought I was already asleep but…" He let his eyes droop shut and rested his head back on my knee, giving up on the tough guy act. They popped open again when he spoke. "They know it's possible now, and they said they didn't know that before."

I nodded slowly again. "Yes."

All dilated pupils and unfocused energy, his eyes lolled around in his head uselessly before closing again.

Dread seeped into my chest cavity like hot fingers grabbing greedily at my windpipe. He hadn't said much—hadn't really said anything—but it was obvious what he'd been trying to say. _They know it's possible now. They'll try again._

I tried to breathe through the panic. Long locks of hair fluttered around my face as I blew out an angry puff of air. I buried my stubby fingernails in Gazzy's mess of straw-colored hair, greasy and damp from sweat and exhaustion. My other hand found the crease on my clammy forehead. _One crisis at a time._

"So you think this girl—"

"I don't know what I think," I muttered back.

Fang's knuckles were white where he gripped at the chain around his ankle. "Okay, then. New subject." His voice was quiet and slow. "Why would they be so convinced that you couldn't get pregnant?"

I swallowed hard and fiddled with the seam of the shirt I was wearing. It was, of course, a stupid question. But he needed to hear me answer it.

I sighed. "They tried in vitro a bunch of times, at the beginning," I said. I didn't have the strength to meet his eyes. "During one of their surgeries, they found out I only have one ovary, like most birds do, so they didn't have a lot of hope for a natural conception, I guess. But they were certain I wouldn't lay an egg—I didn't have enough similarities anatomically, or the hardware consistent with actually producing a shell."

I stole a look over at the Gasman. The rise and fall of his chest confirmed that he was sleeping, so I continued. "After IVF failed, some of their researchers dug deeper into avian reproduction. Apparently, in the avian species, the female stores the sperm in her body from anywhere to a week up to, like, three months before it actually goes anywhere." I shrugged. "IVF bypassed that. They weren't sure if that was why, so…"

Hesitantly, I raised my gaze. A devastated frown tugged Fang's handsome features downward. If he clenched his hands any tighter, I was certain his knuckles would bust right through his skin.

"They told you all of this?"

I barked out a laugh. "God, no. But I'm a _great_ listener."

Under any other circumstances, my comment would've produced a laugh out of Fang. Not today.

"And they didn't think it could happen naturally because…?"

"Different DNA," I said vaguely. "Also, with the way they treated me while I was here, I don't think they thought my body would be able to handle it. Physically."

Fang's jaw remained tight, his eyes on the Gasman's now sleeping form draped in my lap.

I bit my lip and continued in a near whisper. "He's been abusing me since I turned eighteen, and now that we know it _is_ possible, I probably—" _miscarried a million times and never noticed it,_ I finished internally. But I couldn't force the words out of my mouth.

Fang crossed his long legs and settled himself to the floor, eyes raking over my trembling figure before settling on my gaze. His pupils were huge even in the dusky light of the overhead lamp. Those features, so usually unreadable even to me, held layers upon layers of emotion that I couldn't begin to separate. Hurt, concern, sadness. _Rage._

"It is what it is," I said numbly, shrugging a shoulder. One of Fang's huge hands settled in mine, thumb rubbing circles over my knuckles. The anger was still there—I could feel it pulsing through his veins, hear it singing in his blood—but he let himself melt for me. Or maybe he had no choice.

"No," he said, one clipped syllable. His voice was a dangerous whisper, barely audible despite the eerie silence of the room. "That's not how it works. Our childhood 'is what it is.' Being two percent bird 'is what it is.' But _this_ ," he gestured to our surroundings, to me, to the Gasman's still form. "This is something else entirely."

"They put us through the ringer back at the School," I countered quietly.

"They never _raped_ any of us."

And there it was.

Above us, water began rushing through the pipes.

I felt myself deflate beneath his touch. I turned my cheek away from him. His thumb stopped moving in circles over my knuckles—he withdrew my hand and suddenly I was so, so cold.

"I'm sorry, Max," he said in a tone of aggravation. I knew it wasn't at me—it was easy to tell when Fang was aggravated at me—it was more at the circumstances surrounding us and the ugly truth that my life had become. "But that's what it was."

"You think I don't know that?" I hissed. "Jesus, Fang, I might've grown up in a dog crate but I still know what consent is."

I knew how he felt, because I had felt it myself for every single member of my flock at one time or another. That feeling of _I should've been there, I should've protected you_ first reared its ugly head when the School blinded Iggy and then began weaving itself into my everyday life, from Angel's kidnapping to Fang's near-death on the beach to Nudge's borderline depression surrounding being a mutant birdkid.

Strong and silent Fang, possessing a Y-chromosome and having always been the "protector" of our family, felt this way too, I'm sure. Maybe even more than I did.

But none of that would save me, or him, or any of us now. The damage had already been done, and we were here, with the circumstances we had. And we didn't have time for his anger and impatience to be getting in the way. We needed to figure out how to get out of here, alive and relatively unscathed.

"We need a plan," I said.

Fang nodded.

* * *

Two hours later, and whatever shitty plans we'd come up with were lost like puffs of smoke in a tornado when the Gasman started vomiting.

"He just had abdominal surgery," said Fang, a cool blue to my panicked, fretting orange. "Nausea can't be uncommon."

I knelt behind Gazzy and rubbed my hand over his sweaty back as he heaved nothing but bile and saliva, harsh and acrid, onto the cement floor. Something was wrong and I knew it.

"No," I forced out. My thoughts were slamming into a pileup in my brain. "Fang—he's hot—he has to have an infection—"

" _Max,_ " the Gasman wailed, fat tears rolling out of the corners of his eyes. My heart imploded; I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen him cry. "It _hurts_ ," he lamented.

I pulled up the front of his tee shirt, horrified to see the drainage on his abdominal dressing, feel the stifling heat from the incision beneath my hand—

"Fang—"

Fang was at Gazzy's side in an instant, his tan knuckles over Gazzy's pale forehead for only an instant before he met my eyes. It wasn't often that I saw a look of concern obviously splayed on his face, but now his thunderstorm-blues were just a degree short of panic and I didn't care anymore: Gazzy was my baby.

I was at the sliding door before I'd even told my body to go there. The pounding of my fists made a loud thunking echo that I prayed someone would hear. " _Please,_ " I begged, hysterical and loud. "Please—he has an infection—"

Behind me, Fang was positioning the Gasman on his back and peeling off his shirt, revealing the soiled bandage beneath. Carefully, he opened the dressing. The incision was red and puckered, the sutures glaring up at us from the ugly mess that was his abdomen. I saw Fang's Adam's apple bob, his jaw throb as he coiled tight against the circumstances, against our lives, against the world.

" _Please—_ "

The door opened—a Taser was in front of me, a thousand fireworks exploded in my side, and I was launched back against the far wall.

Fang's deepest snarl, instinctive, primal, and protective sounded from across the room—one of my eyes opened to watch as he contemplated my still form while standing protectively in front of the Gasman—

—and then they dragged Gazzy through the doors, leaving Fang's slumped form tight against his restraints, eyelids heavy over his warring ocean eyes.

The lights flickered out as their footsteps retreated. Overhead, the water no longer rushed through the pipes.

And again I was alone.

* * *

Song: "UFO" by Coldplay.

Worked some crazy hours, started feeling sick, ended up hospitalized for THREE WEEKS (!) after catching a serious case of undiagnosed pneumonia from a patient who hadn't been placed on precautions yet. You may think, wow, the hospital! What a great place to write or read or relax!

That's what I thought before I'd ever been hospitalized before.

I'm on the mend, feeling a bit better, and going back to work pretty soon. I do promise I'm sticking with this story, and I am SO sorry I went MIA for a month. I did a lot of thinking about this story between antibiotics and bed baths and labs being drawn. I still have some writers block but, like I said. I'm writing. I know this is short but I wanted to get you an update. It should pick up from here.

Being an adult sucks bigtime.


	13. Thirteen

_The walls of the well as you're falling down into whatever lies below  
Blur from your sight out into the night  
And the moon in the hole in the sky seems so far away, far away  
With your bag full of dreams wild-eyed and hailed on, down on your knees again  
With a handful of sleep and a wandering eye you do what you can,  
But you find you're digging for icicles and only finding rain_

* * *

THIRTEEN

"Fang," I gasped, crawling forward on my hands and knees. My side rippled with aftereffects of the Taser and the cold cement floor bit at my knees through my sweatpants. Fang was face down, still attached to the wall several feet away from me. "Fang," I repeated. He didn't stir.

They had taken the Gasman. As anxious as it made me to not have him in my sight, I knew it was for the better—they'd take him to the medical wing and figure out what was wrong, give him antibiotics. Something.

 _Max,_ he'd wailed. _It hurts_. The memory clenched at my heart like a vice; he hadn't been that vulnerable in years.

I reached Fang and immediately pressed a hand to his chest, relieved when I felt the rise and fall indicative of breathing. I felt completely unhinged, my own breaths ragged and shallow in my chest.

"Breathe," I said out loud, focusing on the way my own voice bounced back at me off the walls. "And think."

We needed a plan. Fang was unconscious, Gazzy was in the medical wing, and I was here. And we needed a plan.

I puffed out a breath of air and leant against the wall of the room, gathering Fang's head into my lap so I could idly run my hands through his hair. His loose curls were slightly damp from sweat, but I could still smell him just the same, cedar and cotton and home.

Without warning, the sliding door clanged open, Mallory's sturdy form advancing through it before closing it behind him. I eased Fang off my lap and leapt to a crouch in front of him, my arms wide at my sides.

Mallory snorted. "Very intimidating. Truly."

A low growl rumbled from somewhere deep inside me. Mallory ignored it.

"In addition to an infection, he had a blockage," Mallory explained. I wondered why he was telling me. "They put in a nasogastric tube to help clear it. Because of your quick healing, medical is confident that the blockage will resolve spontaneously. The tube is out. They were certain he could fight off the infection without the help of antibiotics, but they've started him on wide-spectrum anyway."

I felt myself decompress a fraction. Behind me, Fang emitted a deep, baritone groan and began to stir.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked in a dangerous whisper. Aside from some of the medical staff, nobody here had ever treated me decently, least of all Mallory.

A smirk quirked at the corners of his lips, and he advanced a couple of steps to stand near me. I backed up a step, my heel brushing against Fang's shin, and he stirred again.

The look on Mallory's face nearly paralyzed me. My side was still twitching from the Taser that had been jammed into it minutes ago, and my spine ached from where it had collided with the wall shortly after. Mallory advanced another step, a cold, pallid hand brushing against my cheekbone ever so softly.

A breath hissed out of me and I snapped my head away from him. I recognized that hunger on his face—knew where this was going—I scurried backwards even further, tripping over Fang in a mess of limbs and chaos—Fang's eyes blinked open and went from disoriented to _pissed off_ in milliseconds, navy eyes blazing with fury as he struggled to his feet, gaze jumping from Mallory back to me.

But Mallory was already at the door, sliding it open and backing out, that sick look plastered on his face. "I figured it was only polite," he said, some bullshit, make-believe chivalry dripping from his words. "We've got some experimenting to do in a little bit."

A loaded silence was left in his wake. Fang balled his hand into a fist, staring absently at the wall. We were out of words to describe the shittiness of our situation. I turned and knelt on the floor next to him, wrapping a cold hand around the fist. The last thing we needed was for him to shatter all of the bones in his hand from punching the wall.

"If I just go back there with him—"

"Nope," Fang said, shaking his head hard.

"Just listen to me. If I—"

"It's not an option."

"It can give me a chance to maybe get away from him—it'll just be him and me, maybe I can—"

"Max!" Fang's voice cut through the silence like a machete. Anger exploded across his dark features, painting them with a lethality that I wouldn't test even on my feistiest of days. He composed himself and squeezed his free hand around mine.

He met my eyes and held my gaze as if I were the only thing that had ever mattered, like I held everything precious and dear behind my eyelids. "It's _not an option."_

* * *

It hit me like a piledriver when the footsteps started again ten minutes later.

"I know what we need to do."

Fang looked as flustered as was possible for him, wringing his hands together and twitching his eyes from the door and then back to me. "Any moment now would be great."

"You're going to hate it."

"Humor me."

"Last time when I escaped, I was in the medical wing. Their security is the weakest there—most of the medical staff—"

"Get to the point—"

"You need to punch me in the face."

Fang said nothing, but didn't need to: his eyebrows were so high on his forehead that I thought they might get stuck there forever, and every single pore on his face said _Christ alive, have you finally gone batshit insane on me?_

"If you hit me hard enough, they'll take me to the medical wing—I can try to get out from there, or at least put together a plan—"

"No."

"Fang, this is our only—"

"You hit me, then."

"No—you're disposable to them—they'll just let you sit here. Plus, I don't think I could—"

Fang snorted bitterly. " _Now_ is the time you're going to start saying you're weaker than me?"

The conversation in the hall was coming to a close—any minute now and they'd be throwing the door wide open, preparing to cart us off to some sort of hellish experiment—

"So, what, you're just going to _give up?"_ I screeched, trying to make my voice as shrill and ear-splitting as possible. I raised both hands and shoved Fang hard on the chest. He took a step back, truly looking like he thought I'd lost my marbles.

I jerked my head wildly toward the door and gave him a look: _just go with it._

"I was trapped here for _years_ , and you're just going to lay down and let them do this to us?"

My shrieks echoed on the concrete. I raised my hands to fists and threw a hard right hook at the side of Fang's head. We had sparred so many times in our lives that it was typically impossible to catch him off-guard, but he hadn't expected me to actually throw a punch; my knuckles connected with the hard joint of his jaw. I heard a _snap._

Fang stumbled to the side, a hand coming up to reach his jaw. He opened his mouth a bit. The confusion was gone from his face, as was the stubborn refusal—it was now replaced with something gentle and more delicate.

"I don't want to hurt you," he said, softer than snowflakes, and the purity of his words washed over me like a wave.

I knew what he was implying; I could read between his lines better than anybody else's. He was the sole person I trusted and one of the only people who hadn't broken me when given the chance. Doing this—physically harming me on purpose—he thought would change that.

The hallway was busy again. We didn't have time— _I_ didn't have time to explain to him that _nothing_ would change that. Fang needed to be pissed off enough to forget his bullshit chivalry.

"Fang," I said hurriedly, heart hammering in my chest, "it's either this or he takes me back there and he—and he—"

I was unable to finish the sentence, but I didn't have to. I saw his eyes change, radiating that no-nonsense Fang Fury I'd seen a million times before in my life. That emotion coming to the surface seemed to force him to realize how dire the situation was, because his face contorted into a mix of apology and determination.

"I'm sorry," he said sincerely. And then I was on the ground and covered in blood.

My head smacked the concrete with a _thwack_. I felt the vibrations down the back of my neck and deep into my spine. A groan came out of me that I had no hope in stopping. I cracked open an eye. Fang was hovering over me, looking absolutely tortured by what could only be guilt and self-loathing.

"Broke your nose," he mumbled, reaching a hand up to my face. I predicted that, in that moment, he probably wanted to die.

I swatted his hand away. "Didn't like it anyway."

I could barely choke out the words from behind my hand. My nose refused to stop bleeding, my head was spinning, the lights were flashing—Fang had full-on concussed me with a single punch to the face.

Beyond the ringing in my ears, I heard the clanging of somebody fumbling with the door—"Piss off Mallory—get him to hurt you—they'll take you to the—"

I flung myself dramatically to the ground, collapsing on top of my own messy limbs. I hoped that I looked like I'd been knocked unconscious.

Mallory's unmistakable, clumsy footfalls thundered into the room. His breaths were coming in huffs and there was a moment of silence during which he must've taken in my crumped form, the blood, and Fang standing with a coiled fist.

"What the hell happened in here?" Mallory roared. I felt his hand on the back of my neck—my stomach rolled—and then it was gone, his footsteps trailing toward Fang.

"Wouldn't shut her mouth," Fang said in an agitated voice. I was impressed with the authenticity laced in his voice.

"Wouldn't shut her—she _never_ shuts her mouth!"

"Not our first argument," Fang muttered impatiently.

"Are you crazy? Do you have any idea how valuable she is to this institution?"

"Do you have any idea how much I don't care?" Fang replied, louder this time. "She's a human fucking being, you know, not a toy or whatever you people—"

There was a loud _crack_ followed by an impressive grunt of pain that I recognized as Fang's. I twitched an eye open in a panic—Fang had been knocked back on his back and was holding a hand to a shoulder—his arm twisted out at an unnatural angle, it was definitely dislocated at the very least—

"You," Mallory seethed, his bulky form hovering over where Fang lay, "are disposable. Don't forget it." A gun was holstered on his belt and I knew the Taser was somewhere equally as accessible.

"I am going to kill you." Fang's voice was a rumble in his chest, absolutely laced with hatred. "Do you hear me?" he said through clenched teeth up at Mallory. "If it's the last thing I do on this earth. You are going to die."

I had seen Fang pissed off, I had seen Fang full of loathing; I had seen Fang revengeful, beating the stuffing out of Ari. But I had never seen Fang murderous until now.

His next action sealed his fate with a hard kick to the side of the head: he spit in Mallory's face.

I bit my lip, hard, to stop myself from crying out as Fang's body went completely slack against the floor. Mallory made a sort of grunt of surprise and nudged a toe against Fang's throat, evidently satisfied with his work.

I let my eyes shut as Mallory scooped me into his arms. He opened the door and called into the hallway. "Acton!"

There were footsteps. "Sir," came Acton's baritone.

"Bring him to the medical wing."

"What happened?"

"He's incapacitated."

Acton snorted. "Obviously."

More footsteps, and a third voice. "Sir?"

"Charlie," said Mallory. He adjusted me a bit in his arms. "Take her to the medical wing. I need to have a talk with the boss."

"Is she okay?"

"Fang hit her."

"Fang—?"

"—just concussed, I think," he finished. I was passed into Charlie's waiting arms. "I'll be in there in a few minutes."

It took every bit of restraint in me to not tuck and roll out of Charlie's arms and sprint as fast as I could through the hallways. But I knew this place inside and out—knew that Mallory wouldn't hesitate to pull the pistol and the Taser, and that even if I were to clear the building, there was a long run before I was even remotely close to freedom.

There was also, of course, Fang to worry about. I was desperate to be out of here, but I wouldn't leave him behind.

Charlie started marching down the hallway. I tried to be as dead weight as possible, focusing on keeping my breathing deep and regular.

"Your family is here."

My eyes flew open at Charlie's words, conversational albeit low under his breath. My eyes met his, deep pools of brown lined with worry. They narrowed. "Close your eyes," he hissed.

I obeyed wordlessly.

"My family…?"

"They triggered the inner ring of security alarms," he continued lowly. "We have four separate perimeters—how they even got that close is a mystery to me."

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from grinning like an idiot. I pictured Nudge's deft fingers, Iggy's calculating mind, Angel's mind games. _My family._

"They're lucky Mallory trusts me. He asked me to check it out, I convinced him it must've been an animal. I've been stalling him to buy you time."

My mind was spinning. Charlie had gone out of his way to protect us, but why? Wouldn't that only put his daughter in danger?

More importantly: if he wanted to help us, why couldn't he just _let Fang and I out of here?_

"I can't just open the door and watch you go," he said, maybe reading my face, maybe inferencing what I must be ruminating. "There's too much at stake. But if a map of the facility happened to end up somewhere nearby the closest access point…" His shoulders rose and fell. "There's no telling who put it there."

I couldn't breathe. "Gazzy—?" I choked out.

"Is here," he said. The air changed and the smell of antiseptic bit at my nose, and I knew we were in the medical wing. "Still running a bit of a fever, but they say he should be good as new in a couple of days."

Charlie put me down gently on a stretcher and the medics quickly began their process; a blood pressure cuff was wrapped around my arm, machines started beeping, a flashlight was singing my retinas. I moaned lowly and stirred, hoping to look like I was coming out of a state of unconsciousness.

A woman's face, friendly and tired, greeted me. She smiled sadly and held out a finger, drawing lines in the air to different points of my periphery. The overhead lights hurt and I could feel my head beginning to swell. I lazily followed her fingertip with my eyes.

"Gazzy," I called as loudly as I could, ignoring the fireworks behind my eyes. I couldn't see him but Charlie had said he was here—he had to be here. "Gazzy, we're okay." I had no idea if it was true.

There was a grunting noise and I turned my head to see Acton struggling with Fang, who was conscious again and thrashing wildly. I was secured to the table by the leather restraint and I watched as Acton did the same to Fang, unforgivingly slamming him against the exam table. His shoulder was still dislocated and his lower lip was split and bleeding.

He slowed his thrashing and turned to face me. "Are you okay?" I asked, my voice sounding miles away in my head. His features blurred.

"Peachy," he spat.

"Lover's quarrel?" Acton laughed and crossed the room to me. One of his hands found my cheek and stroked it once. Behind him, Fang growled and battled his bindings. "Oh, _please_ ," Acton muttered.

"Enough, Acton," Charlie barked from the middle of the room. He'd opened a computer screen and logged in, typing noisily on the keyboard.

"You going soft, Chuck?" Acton laughed, dropping his hand from my face and crossing to the center of the room. "Don't tell me you're letting these freaks get to your—"

 _BOOM!_

The sound was distinctive; I had heard it countless times in my life, from the E house, to the streets, to the woods, to everywhere in between. There was something unmistakable about the sound of a pressure cooker bomb detonating, and Iggy had perfected them somewhere between the ages of ten and twelve.

A distant scream, a plume of smoke from the hallway, the smell of fire—

A deranged sort of laugh came out of Fang in the millisecond of peace after the explosion. Life moved in slow motion; I counted the dust particles dancing in front of my line of sight, studied the laugh lines on the nurse's face as she turned to face an equally stunned Charlie and Mallory.

"Oh, man," Fang lamented. "Your life just got a whole hell of a lot worse."

And then: utter chaos.

* * *

"Digging for Icicles" by Bob Schneider.

Did not proofread. Apologies!


	14. Fourteen

_Some will fill with ice and concrete grey  
_ _Cold and dark go on for days and days  
_ _Til the only thing that remains is the dirty rain_

 _Nothing's really ever gold anymore, nothing shines like it did before_

 _Flat and static paved in progress' name  
_ _What will all our little children say  
_ _When the only place to play is in the dirty rain?_

* * *

 **CHAPTER FOURTEEN**

The air filled with ash and debris faster than I thought was possible—as I became more panicked, my breathing became quicker, and I choked against the hot soot as it singed my trachea. My head was still pounding, pulse like a drum in my ears, I didn't know where Gazzy was, the room had just exploded—

I think I cried out. The nurse who'd just been by my side was back there, her worried eyes piercing mine. _Relax,_ she was trying to tell me. Her hand twitched in the direction of my restraints. I found myself wondering if she was a mother as I studied the warring expression on her face. She would never speak to me—could never, not after she was forced into this world of silence—but in the split second of reverie after the explosion and before my wits returned to me, I imagined that so much of who she was relied on her compliance with her employment here.

The reverie was over. Charlie roared up next to me through the haze, hands working dexterously to unfasten the leathers at my waist and knees. I was free in a moment and I log rolled off the table, landing in a crouch at its side.

I could barely see him, but I knew he was there. "If you see my daughter—" his voice broke off, as if he were unable to see the sentence through to the end.

As sorry as I felt for him and as thankful as I was, _we didn't have time_. I nodded shortly, sealing the promise with my body language, and closed the gap between Fang and I.

When I found him, his lips were pulled shut tightly, a grimace painted on his olive face. "You'd think it was a smoke bomb," he muttered. A cough ripped through his chest as I tore his restraints from him. "Alright?" he asked. I grunted in response.

Mallory was screaming from somewhere across the madness, and I saw Acton's sturdy form barreling through the grey toward us.

Fang launched himself forward with a grace typically only reserved for ballet dancers, cocking his fist back tightly before plunging it directly into the side of Acton's head. Fang managed to actually catch Acton off guard, the thicker of the two men listing to the side, balance eradicated completely by Fang's knuckles.

That punch from Fang was the first domino - the rest was history from there for Acton. I threw myself at him, finding myself straddling his waist, punches flying from me as if my arms were a separate, motorized entity. I don't know how long I stayed there for - years, probably - just absolutely whaling on him.

I pictured Mallory's filthy ponytail, his puked-up seaweed eyes, his greasy complexion. But it was Acton's fair features I pounded into, blood coming away on my fists like sap from a tree during syrup season.

Acton was tough and strong, a trained fighter that had been with EU probably almost as long as the boss himself had been. He knew all of my moves and had been the cause of nearly as many injuries as Mallory.

As powerful as he was, nothing was going to outlast the fury bubbling beneath my skin and pounding through my vessels; this place had taken enough from me, and if I was given another chance of a lifetime to get out of here, nobody was getting in my way.

There was a rustle from behind me and then Fang was at my side sporting a split cheek and a frown. I registered his features in my periphery. The low, smooth rumble of his voice rolled somewhere in the back of my head, but I couldn't make out his words as I continued to wail on Acton.

I couldn't stop staring at the blood. It was wedged beneath my fingertips, seeping into the tiny cuts between my fingers—

A wave of nausea overcame me and I sort of toppled to the side off Acton's abdomen, steadying myself against the concrete floors with bloodied hands. Fang pulled me further to the side and gripped my shoulder tightly in one hand.

"Max."

His voice finally started making sense and I forced my chin up to meet his eyes amid the chaos. My gaze started trailing to Acton—there was _so much blood—_ and Fang grabbed my chin in his free hand, forcing me to look at him.

"Let's go," he said firmly. There was something I couldn't quite place behind the stony determination in his irises. Vaguely, somewhere deep, I wondered if it was fear.

I nodded once and let him pull me to my feet.

"There are tons of soldiers around here," said Fang, pulling me through the smoke. "I took a couple of them out."

 _A couple._ There was a mess of bodies scattered across the floor.

"Where's Gazzy?" I managed.

He didn't answer.

My left hand was gripped in Fang's as he pulled me toward some unseen destination, but a stranger poked at my right one and I withdrew it quickly, turning on my heel with a defensive snarl.

It was that nurse again—she was probably in her thirties but her huge, periwinkle-blue eyes gave her a sense of horrified naivete. She blinked and tugged me toward her. Every fiber of my being screamed _trust no one_ , but I followed her anyway, wrenching my hand out of Fang's when he didn't oblige to my pulling.

Fang grabbed back at my wrist and moved to yank me back into him. "Max—!"

The hand went slack as the nurse led us to the Gasman himself, smothered in blankets on a hospital bed, looking so much like the eight-year-old I remembered him most dearly as. He was still pale but looked considerably less sickly than he had even hours before.

"Thank you," I breathed to the nurse, and she only nodded, turning her head toward the source of the smoke before disappearing into it.

"Fang, we need to get him out of—"

There was another roaring explosion from behind us somewhere followed by a rush of heat. I turned in time to watch flames lick the far side of the medical wing before the wall collapsed in on itself.

"The building is going to come down," Fang called from behind me, his face covered in sweat and determination. His thick hair was matted down on the sides of his head and he was covered in dirt and ash; wildly, I imagined that this was Mt. Vesuvius and we would be preserved here indefinitely if we didn't make it out—

I turned back to the Gasman, prepared to drag him by his ear to safety if I needed to, and found his bed empty.

Then I heard a familiar growl.

 _Mallory._

The smoke began to clear toward the ceiling and I had a split second of recognition as I stared across the room. The pistol I'd seen holstered so many times was drawn from its safe place on his hip and instead sat parallel against the Gasman's temple. Gazzy was unconscious, his lanky form pulled off the ground and tight to Mallory's chest. The gun was loaded. It always was.

And he'd use it. I knew he would.

"No—" I choked out, darting forward toward him. "Take me— _Ma_ _llory,_ don't you _dare—_ "

The lights cut out. A gunshot rang out into the air; singular, pure.

Then a siren began blaring.

" _Gazzy!_ " It was a wail from somewhere deep in my soul, splitting the air like the roar of a fighter jet. " _No_!"

There were fingertips on the back of my arm then, feather-light and dusting—when I fought them, they were long and painful against my upper arm. " _Max."_ It was Iggy's voice. A hiss. My heart soared at the familiar rumble of his voice. "You need to trust me. The building is going to—"

I was dizzy from the blackness and the scream of the siren made my head pound even more painfully. " _Gazzy_!"

Iggy's hands were fisted in the back of my shirt and I instinctively fought against him. He held me close to him and I heard the familiar _fwip!_ of a switchblade and a million absurd thoughts immediately shot through my head.

Before any of them could come to fruition in the form of action, the zip ties tight against my wings were cut away and Iggy's giant hand was gripping mine for dear life.

There was another cry from across the room that I recognized as Nudge—I couldn't see anything, couldn't differentiate sounds or tell where they were coming from—Iggy was pulling me away from something, towards the heat—

And I had never been more certain that I was going to die.

Another gunshot.

 _Where was Fang?_

The lights cut back in just as I was literally thrown into the air by Iggy's ropy arms—" _Fly!_ " he demanded—and the second I forced my wings wide open, the building below me exploded into flames, leaving nothing but a decimated field in the middle of the thick forestry.

Powerful waves of energy from the blast forced me further into the air, so I folded my wings in and let myself be carried by the current. My ears popped as I shot backward. I stared down at the chaos, trying to focus my blurred vision on Iggy's form careening toward me in the midnight air.

The cloudy blues of his irises were barely visible beyond the blown vacuums of his pupils. Just as the momentum of the explosion stopped carrying me he was there, arms under me and pulling me tight to him. I'd never seen him looked so panicked.

My stomach was rolling and I could hear my pulse throbbing in my ears but nothing else—I tried to say something but couldn't hear my own voice, so instead I gestured wildly to the burning ground below me.

But Iggy was streaking through the sky away from the explosion, unable to see my gestures and too focused on his own task at hand to pay attention to what I may be trying to indicate.

Sounds returned slowly. When I dug my fingernails into his back, Iggy slowed down, ghosting his fingertips over the inside of my wrist as if feeling for a pulse. "What, Max?"

I tried to free myself from his arms but his grasp on me was too tight. A frustrated growl tore from the center of my chest and I glared at him. His eyes narrowed in response.

We landed a couple hundred yards away from the remains of EU. Iggy placed me in the dewy grass and assessed me for damage. His hands found my swollen nose and he grimaced. "This might be crooked forever. Jesus Christ, who punched you? No wonder you sound concussed."

I elected to not answer. "How did you find us?"

The question seemed to pull the pair of us away from the reality of the situation. A toothy grin split Iggy's face and he pulled me into a crushing hug. He, too, elected not to answer. "I'm just happy you're alive."

"Iggy," I rasped, but there was another explosion and we both whipped our heads around to face it.

Reality was back. "Later," he barked. "I need to go back there. _Stay where you—_ "

"Iggy," I repeated, this time in a warning tone. "If you think I'm going to sit here—"

"You're concussed, you're hurt, and you're what they want. You need to—"

A white figure crashed into the grass in front of us and it took me a dazed moment to recognize that it was Angel. She was on her feet again in a nanosecond, curls tied up in a snarled ponytail at the top of her head. When she spoke, her voice was thick with tears; subconsciously, I reached a hand out to her. "We got separated," she cried, panicked, "I can't find Gazzy anywhere."

Iggy's eyebrows nearly hit the troposphere. A hand raked through his hair, making it dance atop his head like the unruly flame we'd left behind us. His albatross wings shot open, stiff and wide against his back. I'd seen them a million times before, but the sheer size of them would always take my breath away.

"What do you _mean_ you got separated? Angel—" Iggy looked positively flustered, which was not unlike him during times of high stress. Still, I hadn't seen him take out his frustration on the younger kids since I'd been back.

"I _know!_ " Angel wailed. "I tried—but I couldn't see through the smoke…" She continued to babble on, tears leaking from her perfect eyes.

Iggy was floating in the air and I snapped my own wings open to hover next to him. We rose above the tree line and I felt my lungs fill with air when I saw them, just silhouettes in the moonlight.

It was Nudge I saw first, her mess of hair wide and chaotic in the humidity. Another slightly lankier figure was hanging beneath her; her hands were wrapped underneath their armpits and they swayed dangerously in the night air.

 _The Gasman._ Against all odds, she was carrying the Gasman through the sky.

Just behind her was a shape I'd always recognize as Fang, but something about his figure was off. Iggy cocked his head to the side. "Somebody's crying."

As Fang approached, it became clearer. Allie had her hands clasped around his neck in a death grip, sobbing wildly into the air. The nurse who'd been there with me in the medical wing was cradled in his arms, but she wasn't moving, skin white as a sheet in the midnight.

Nudge approached but didn't wait for us to greet her-she adjusted her beautiful wings a bit too drastically, forcing her to crash land in the grass next to Angel. She tumbled flat on her back with Gazzy draped awkwardly across her.

As Iggy dove to meet them, I rushed to intercept Fang. His shoulder was still popped out awkwardly, his face was littered with bruises, and he was bleeding openly from several parts of his body. But he was _alive_. Christ almighty, we were all _alive._

Fang's eyes were fierce. A furious protectiveness I'd become well acquainted with in the past few days gave the normally serene oxford blue a terrifying undertone—we both had a million unanswered questions.

But first, we needed to get the hell out of there. I angled my wings toward the ground to land and he followed behind me.

* * *

As soon as my feet hit the grass, I knew several things were seriously wrong.

My immediate attention went to the Gasman, who was supine on the forest floor with Iggy hovering over him. Iggy's pale fingers danced across Gazzy's skin-the latter had always been fair, but Iggy typically made all of us look tanned. Now, Gaz was even sallower than Iggy.

"Gazzy," I breathed, but nobody seemed to hear me.

Iggy was muttering something about a fever. Angel was fretting over Nudge, who had a massive gash across her forehead. Nudge was insisting she was fine, swatting away Angel's invasive hands. "Iggy can stitch me later, I'm fine."

Fang was knelt next to the nurse. Aside from being unconscious, she looked otherwise no worse for the wear.

The only one of us who was untouched was Allie, who was curled into Fang's side and bawling into the older woman's lap. I thought this to be strange until I connected the similarities in the features of the two of them, the loose curls, the pointed chins and noses, the dimpled cheeks. The only distinctive difference between them was their eyes: the nurse's were a sky blue, like Iggy's, but Allie had Charlie's deep mahogany brown orbs.

"Mom," cried Allie.

And it all made sense.

There was entirely too much for my damaged brain to process; I couldn't decide whether to panic over the Gasman, hug Angel, stitch Nudge, fall to pieces thanking Iggy, or cry like a baby in relief for myself. Some deranged part of me settled on the least important of everything.

"Where's Charlie?" I forced out, some panicked note singing from the most maternal part of me. Fang tried to hide a grimace but didn't meet my eyes. One of his large, warm hands cupped Allie's trembling shoulder.

"Fang," I tried again.

Allie sobbed harder into her mother's singed shirt. It was all the answer I needed.

I sat cross-legged in the grass for a moment and then laid flat on my back.

Iggy was murmuring something to Nudge over Gazzy's still form. Angel sat beside them, legs hugged to her chest as she cried softly. Fang rose from his spot next to the nurse and Allie and padded over to me, expression tight with concern and exhaustion. The worry had already started to crease the skin by his eyes.

The corners of his mouth tightened as he knelt next to me and took my hand, thumb rubbing circles over my knuckles. He opened his mouth, ready to say something, but closed it after studying my face. The chapped pink of his lips blurred and I wondered if I was crying.

Iggy appeared behind him. "Let me set your shoulder," he said, but Fang shrugged him off.

Ig sighed. "We need to move." Fang nodded in agreement.

Eventually, their voices drifted, a million miles away in the underbrush. I felt a hand I knew to be Fang's at my shoulder shaking me, but I couldn't be bothered.

 _Sleep_ , something said. And I laid down and let the constellations dance behind my lids.

* * *

Song: "Dirty Rain" by Andrew Combs.


	15. Fifteen

_Sometimes I think about the ones that we've replaced  
All the millions underneath the burnt and waste  
And I get sad because, of course, we'll be the same  
All of history collapsing in its wake_

 _Maybe it's enough that I have laid here_  
 _Maybe it's enough that I have known inside my head_  
 _And maybe it's enough to know that we were here together_  
 _And that we are the ones for now_

* * *

I woke up what must've been minutes later to a tender hand shaking my shoulder violently. "Max," came Iggy's panicked voice.

From behind him came a quiet _ouch_.

"Quit trying to poke around in her head," Iggy snapped, a little too harshly. "We don't need anybody else hurt."

My eyeballs were rolling behind my lids and I tried to focus on the blackness as it speckled with purple and blue. The crickets were still chirping and I could still hear the telltale crackle of a fire hundreds of yards away.

At once, it all came slamming back. _It's burning down._

Nudge's voice joined the conversation from a little ways behind me. The typically calm timbre of her soprano was barely recognizable through the panicked shakiness it had taken on. "We need to get out of here."

"Nudge." Fang's voice was so, so gentle. It reminded me of how he'd regarded me immediately after my breakdown on the beach years ago-crippling concern lined with a bit of masked fear. "I've got him. He's okay. We're all okay."

I opened my eyes to meet Iggy's blind ones. I groaned lowly and he pulled a face that mixed relief and a smirk in a way only he could. "Welcome back to the land of the living," he said.

I ignored him and looked past him to Nudge. "I'm not letting him go," she was saying in that shaky voice. Her long, dark arms were wrapped around the Gasman's middle in a death grip, and she'd pulled him into her lap. It was almost comical with how much taller he was than her.

"Nudge," Fang repeated.

I tried to push myself into a sitting position and moaned again when the world spun like I was on a freaking merry-go-round of pain and torture. "Easy," said Iggy. He braced one of his hands against my back. "Think you can fly?"

I was absolutely, positively concussed, every cell in my body ached, and I felt like I could sleep like the dead for the next six days. The last thirty minutes of my life were a choppy, irregular blur; the building had collapsed and Iggy had dragged me out, that was about all I was certain of. The world was still dancing before me as it was.

But the alternative to flying was staying here, which almost guaranteed me—or worse, all of us—a one-way trip back to EU.

I met Fang's eyes. He nodded almost imperceptibly.

"Yep," I answered. I let Iggy pull me to my feet. "How did you—?"

He shook his head minutely and spoke gently. "Not now."

I was too tired to argue.

Iggy stood to my left, wrapping one arm around my waist and hoisting my left arm over his shoulders so he was supporting most of my weight as we hobbled over to the rest of the group. I did a quick once over of each of my flock members. Everyone was alive.

 _Surviving, not thriving,_ I thought bitterly.

Angel pulled up to my other side and threw her arms around me, bumping me into Iggy's side. Iggy hissed. "Easy."

"I'm so glad you're okay," Angel muttered. I could tell she was trying to hold it together for me, for all of us—but I also knew her, had _raised_ her, and I knew it was difficult for her.

"I'm fine, Ange." I reached my free hand up to pat her messy ponytail. "Where did the nurse and Allie go?"

Iggy jerked his head toward the treeline. "Took off. We told them to start running and we'd buy them some time if anyone came our way." He waved his free arm vaguely behind him, toward where the fire that had consumed the building roared. "The fucking SEALs will be here in minutes."

My pulse jumped beneath my skin and I jerked toward the edge of the field. Iggy's arm immediately tightened around my waist, as if I were a dog on a leash. _Heel_. "We needed to help them."

Iggy looked incredibly somber. "Max," he said, gesturing to our family, to the burning building in the distance, to his own bloodied clothes. "We need to help ourselves."

The flock was more disjointed than I could ever recall. Nudge was still huddled over the Gasman. Fang, kneeling next to her, had a hand around her shoulders and was looking over his shoulder nervously, like he was waiting for Mallory himself to roar up behind us and empty a round of bullets into the clearing we were sitting ducks in.

Now, more than ever, they needed a leader.

"Listen up," I said weakly.

Four pairs of positively exhausted eyes flashed up to me. I realized that I had nothing prepared to say.

"Inspirational start, Max," cracked Iggy from next to me.

"We need to move," Fang said, ignoring Iggy's attempt at humor. He unsnaked his arm from around Nudge and rose to his full height, his right shoulder still obviously dislocated.

"Still need to set that," Iggy muttered.

Fang continued to ignore him. "I'll take Gazzy. We'll need to clear this area pretty far up there, I'm sure the FBI will be sending in the choppers once the local volunteer firefighters realize what the fuck was going on here. Get a few hundred miles between us and this place, find a hotel. Once we get there, we'll— _fucking Christ_."

A loud crack sounded through the clearing, and Fang, in surprise, had let his 'infallible superhero' façade drop. His left hand came up to massage his right shoulder as he looked irritatedly at the culprit.

Nudge, teary-eyed and blood-stained, had risen next to him and set his shoulder, mid-speech. Her normally shining eyes were dull with a blank expression to match. I wasn't sure if I was seeing catatonia, exhaustion, devastation, or a combination of all three.

"Let's just go," she said.

* * *

I had never, ever, in my wildest dreams, imagined escaping EU alive. But there I was, flying over the cliff's edge for the second time in a week, Angel's colorless wings brushing the tips of mine on her downstrokes.

Nudge, stubborn as she was, was forced to surrender Gazzy's limp form to Fang before we hit the skies. Not only was he taller than she was, but he must've had at least thirty pounds on her, all sinewy muscle that he'd gained in the four years of my absence. Nudge wouldn't have lasted fifteen minutes with him weighing her down.

"Is he going to be okay?" Nudge asked anxiously for what must've been the thousandth time. Iggy was flying alongside her and matching her wingstrokes, much like Angel was with me. "He's so pale—that incision has to be infected—"

"He's with us," Iggy said quietly, overlapping her wing a little extra. "We're all together. That means everything is going to be fine."

Nudge looked entirely unconvinced, her eyes giant with worry. "The last time I saw him, we were screaming our heads off at each other," she mumbled. She sniffed once, hard, and rubbed the back of her hand over her eyes. "He probably thinks I hate him—I bet that was his last thought, 'Nudge hates me, five people in the whole world that I can even trust and one of them called me a blubbering shithead the last time she saw me'—oh, God, I'll never forgive myself—"

She was wailing by the end. Iggy cut her off. "Well, when he wakes up and we tell him all about how you saved his life, I think you two will be just fine," he said, smiling his huge, dimpled smile. He angled his wings a bit to bump shoulders with Nudge, wiggling his eyebrows as he did so.

Nudge coughed out a laugh, wiping her eyes again. "You're such an idiot," she said. She cast one final, long look over her shoulder at Gazzy and then swallowed the remainder of her tears.

Fang had hoisted the Gasman onto his back as if he were a backpack and was holding Gazzy's hands crossed over his chest. His powerful wings, ebony and muscled, pumped silently in the night, giving no indication that they were supporting an extra hundred-and-change pounds of birdkid.

When he sensed my gaze on him, he turned his head to meet me. "Think you can do an hour or two at this pace?" he asked. "We need to land, but we need to put some miles between…"

I just nodded once. I knew I should be heckling him— _uh, excusez-moi, porc sexiste?_ _Can_ you _do an hour at this pace?_ —but I truly wasn't convinced that I _could_ do an hour or two at our pace, and I prayed that between he and Iggy they'd be able to support Gazzy for at least a few hundred miles.

The flight went by without an issue—we managed to log around three hundred miles. Nobody spoke. By the time we landed, the thick of night had finally settled over the horizon, and I was nearly dropping out of the sky. Iggy hoisted his backpack from his shoulder, shoving through the contents before finally pulling out his wallet.

"Fuck it," he announced with finality, flipping it open and sliding his hand into the cash pocket. "I don't care. Five-star, tonight. On me."

We settled for a Holiday Inn in the sleepy little city of Alpena, Michigan. The hotel itself was nestled against a river that opened into Lake Huron; we could see a lighthouse that overlooked the Great Lake from the huge picture window in the living room of our suite. It was almost like something out of a romantic comedy.

Aside from the fact that my three birdkid siblings had just saved myself and two fellow birdkids from a torturous cesspool in the woods somewhere. Not even Ryan Reynolds could make _that_ story marketable.

"Put us down for a few nights," Fang said before we stepped into the lobby. Gazzy was still on his back; I prayed that nobody would ask questions about the possibly-sleeping-definitely-unconscious fourteen-year-old we were towing in with us. Not to mention how rag-tag the rest of us looked.

"Absolutely not," I said, stepping to stand between the two of them. "We need to get back to the house—"

"They're going to assume we went there. I guarantee they'll send a battalion. Probably already have."

"'Fool me twice…'" Iggy muttered.

I shook my head. "Your life is there, all of your belongings—your jobs, Nudge needs to graduate—"

"Max," Nudge said gently, bumping her hip into mine. "We're so far beyond that point."

"Well, I'm not," I snapped.

Anxiety was rising in my chest again—something as minor as this had triggered some sort of fight or flight response from me—and Fang put his hand on my back. I dodged his touch, shaking my head. It was still pounding from the concussion he'd given me hours prior. "All we ever wanted was a normal life, and now you guys have it, and we can't just give it up like that."

"We have wings," Iggy said with a little bit of a chuckle. I finally looked up and met the four confused faces of my currently responsive family members. "It was never going to be a normal life."

"It was nice for a while, but I take having you back over everything in that dumb house," Angel said quietly.

"Duh," said Nudge.

Iggy nodded. "Plus, it's not like we can't ever be normal again—people move away, quit their jobs—we can even just get different identities." He wrapped an arm around Angel. "Why do you think we keep this one around?"

She whacked him on the arm. " _Hey_."

I sighed and felt the exhaustion of the past couple of days collapse on me like a pile of bricks. Fuzzy dots had started to fleck my vision. I rubbed my eyes with a filthy hand. "Okay, whatever, book a couple of nights, I don't care. We just need to get up there so we can talk."

Iggy took Angel with him and together they booked the biggest room available, a one-bedroom suite with a couple of full-sized beds and a pull-out couch. Iggy took the liberty of asking the concierge for a menu for the nearest takeout available.

Angel used her persuasion to get us through the lobby with a deadweight Gazzy on Fang's back. Once we got into the room, Iggy dumped his backpack on a side table and extracted his cellphone from it. "First thing's first." He pulled out the takeout menu and asked Angel to recite the number on the front for him. After a few moments of silence, he spoke. "Hi, I'd like to order eight large pizzas to the Holiday Inn."

* * *

A/N: "For Now" by Kina Grannis.

I could give you a million excuses, each one of them valid, but I won't.

The last chapter was a bit confusing, I know – chalk that up to either 1) my inability/unwillingness to write a good fight scene, or 2) Max's concussion. The latter was truly the intent, but it does a nice job of shadowing the former.


	16. Sixteen

_And all the people say  
You can't wake up, this is not a dream  
You're part of a machine, you are not a human being  
With your face all made up, living on a screen  
Low on self-esteem, so you run on gasoline_

 _I think there's a flaw in my code  
These voices won't leave me alone  
Well my heart is gold and my hands are cold_

* * *

SIXTEEN

There was a faint _beep_ as Iggy hung up the phone, and then a heavy, exhausted silence blanketed over the hotel room. Fang had set the Gasman down on the fold-out couch in the living room and pulled open Iggy's backpack, sifting through the contents for his first aid pack. Nudge emerged from the bathroom with a couple of towels, a bowl of water, and a wet facecloth, which she handed off to Fang.

I was nearly bursting at the seams with questions and anxiety and plans, but I was also concussed and overwhelmed. I sat heavily on the loveseat, leaning back into the cushions and allowing my eyes to close for a few moments. _Regroup. Breathe._

Somebody heaved a gigantic sigh and collapsed next to me. "To start, is everybody okay? Physically, I mean." Iggy.

A chorus of _fine_ s and _okay_ s met his question. My eyes fluttered opened to survey my flock. Nudge sat perched at the edge of the massive armchair across from me, looking ready to up-and-away at a moment's notice. Angel was huddled on the floor, leaning against the wall. For a moment, the only sound disrupting the silence was that of Fang ripping open gauze packets.

"How did you find us?" I asked. My voice was hoarse and weak, so I cleared my throat. "How did you—you looked for so long, last time—"

"Cara," Iggy said simply, gravely. I opened my mouth to ask again— _how? —_ but he interrupted me. "She collected a sample from you, the night you came back. When she assessed you. She said she was going to run it under a false name and medical record number at work. I found the papers went I went—" he paused, swallowed, cleared his throat, "—when I went to her place. There was a cop's phone number sticky-noted to it, I reached out to him, I guess he'd owed her a favor…"

"Jesus Christ," Fang muttered under his breath.

I was devastated. "She put so much on the line to help me. I can't believe—"

Iggy cut me off. "The DNA was consistent with a Mallory Smith of Michigan. Several other crimes were registered in the Detroit and New York City areas."

I recognized his deflection immediately. I had just been giving Iggy flack for having a crush on her, and now she was dead because she'd done us a favor. My heart ached. "Ig," I said as gently as I could muster. "I'm so sorry about—"

He shook his head once with finality. "Not now," he managed, and that was that.

"Once we had a name and a couple of states to look in, it really wasn't that hard," Nudge said, her voice much quieter and softer than normal. "I cross referenced some police reports, tried keywords like 'research' and 'hybrids' with things like 'Mallory Smith' and 'Michigan.' There had been a couple of vague, intentionally buried news stories since the School and Itex were exposed about ex-employees allegedly branching out that never went anywhere, reported by local newspapers in random parts of the country. Almost all of them pointed to the upper peninsula of Michigan." Nudge shrugged half-heartedly. "We picked a few isolated areas to fly over and happened to find a building hidden in the woods."

"Once we saw the security perimeter, we knew," Angel said darkly.

It took my busted brain a moment to process this information. _A sample_. Which meant that Mallory's greed and cruelty had been his downfall, in the end. It was the only way they'd been able to even get an idea of a location.

It should've made me feel a little bit better. Instead, all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry.

Nudge got off her chair and settled in a spot next to where Fang knelt next to Gazzy. She dipped the facecloth in the bowl of water and wrung it out, using a corner to clean the soot and dirt from his face.

Fang had cut open Gazzy's abdominal dressing, revealing the puckered incision underneath. It looked significantly better than it had before—much less red, and much less drainage—but I still wasn't completely satisfied with the way it was healing.

Nudge stopped wiping his face and leant back on her heels, her eyes not leaving the Gasman's face. "I thought he was going to die," she said quietly. "When they tried to shoot him."

My mind flashed back to what felt like days ago, right before the building had come down around us. The gun had cocked and Mallory's arms were around the Gasman, the lights had cut and I'd heard the gunshot, and then Iggy was throwing me into the air and demanding that I fly.

"I've never been so certain that somebody was going to die before," she continued.

Every fiber of my being wanted to get up off the couch and engulf Nudge in the biggest, most bone-crushing hug I could manage. But I was frozen in my position next to Iggy.

Fang secured the final piece of tape around the fresh gauze he'd put over the incision. He leant back, too, and wrapped a long arm around Nudge's shoulders. Tears had started to streak down her face, cutting clean paths through the soot and dirt that clouded her typically flawless complexion.

"I surprised… _him_ , I think, and I put myself between them. Then I thought _I_ was going to die." She toyed with the fraying end of Gazzy's shirt. "God, it sucked," she finished with a dark chuckle.

Several minutes of silence passed, after which Angel found the remote and turned the TV on, flipping through a few channels before landing on CNN. A young reporter was standing in the dark with the remnants of EU burning in the background.

Fang let out a bitter laugh. "How about that turnaround."

"… _reporting from Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Alger County, Michigan, where there's been a massive explosion at an unregistered factory…"_

Iggy snorted. "Factory, my ass."

"… _several different counties across the Upper Peninsula have sent in fire crews and SWAT is on-site. The biggest concern, however, is not the source of this fire or the anonymity of this establishment, but the insidiousness of what may have been going on behind these walls: a source tells us this place went by the name of Eugenics United."_

"EU," I gasped. "That's what it stood for."

" _Eugenics?_ " said Iggy.

"It's an old Nazi term," Fang said through clenched teeth. "A belief system about choosing preferred genetic makeups by way of selective breeding."

"… _at least three dead and several others injured. Authorities are certain, however, that several suspects fled the scene. Fire crews are telling us the blaze was well underway by the time they arrived. If you see something, say something, and please report it to our tip line at 1-800…"_

Iggy snorted again and did his best snotty reporter voice. "Yes, if you see superhuman men and blackmailed medical employees sprinting from the scene of an unexplained inferno—"

A loud rapping noise on the door sent me launching to the balls of my feet, knocking over the lamp on the side table and effectively destroying whatever sense of calm had started to settle over us.

Nudge rose from the floor and grabbed the money Iggy had left on the table. "Pizza," she said in a defeated sort of singsong voice.

Fang was at her side instantly, trying to place his body between her and the door. "Let me check," he muttered.

Nudge sighed exasperatedly. "I'm more than capable of looking through a peephole, Fang," she said, and butted him out of the way. He let her pass but continued to hover behind her.

The moment the door opened and the smell of pizza filled the hotel room, an overwhelming feeling of nausea overcame me and I darted for the bathroom.

There was nothing solid in my stomach to throw up, but I heaved painfully over the toilet. Involuntary tears streamed from the corners of my eyes and I rested my head against the cool cabinet next to me.

A gentle knock on the door followed shortly that I knew belonged to Fang. "Don't come in," I groaned. It was halfhearted and he opened the door anyway.

Concern saturated every single one of his features. Those dark blue eyes raked over my figure, assessing for damage.

"I'm fine," I said as he settled on the edge of the tub next to me. "The smell was just too much."

"You have a concussion."

I suddenly remembered a pivotal piece of information. "You were shot," I challenged. I reached forward for his shirt and, to my surprise, he didn't flinch.

At the very least, I expected to see a bit of an open space—maybe something that Iggy had redressed at some point when I wasn't paying attention—but I was shocked to find that the area had already scarred over. _How long were we in there?_

"See?" he said. "All better. Now can we please—"

Another wave of nausea crashed over me and I heaved again. An angry, frustrated groan ripped out of me. Fang huffed a massive sigh, collecting my hair into a knot in the middle of my back. "This isn't a joke, Max."

"You think I don't know that?"

"Concussions are serious."

"You're trying to act like all six of us haven't had dozens of them—"

"This is different and you know it," he growled. "You haven't had a second of downtime since I hit you. You've been running on adrenaline. You _just_ got back from _years_ of torture, and then you were taken back there. You need to give your body some time to recover."

It was a speech, by Old Fang terms, but I ignored him anyway and took a couple of deep breaths. Rested my head against the cabinet again. I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears.

"You need to eat something," Fang said, his voice a bit quieter but still serious.

"Same to you," I snapped back.

" _Max_ ," he said gently. His tone said, _you know it's not the same._

"Fang," I echoed back. _Quit babying me._

An indiscrete eye roll. _Christ, Max._

"Just give me a minute," I begged him, refusing to meet his eyes. I didn't think I could stomach the pity in his gaze. "I'll meet you out there. I'm fine, I swear."

I felt his eyes on me for a moment more, and then he retreated with a sad sigh, leaving the soft _thump_ of the door shutting in his wake.

* * *

I joined the flock back in the living room, settling cross-legged next to Iggy on the couch. He shoved an entire pizza box into my hand. "Eat."

It didn't take a genius to realize that Iggy and Fang were now a lethal one-two punch, and that they wouldn't go down without a fight if I was going to refuse to do something they wanted me to. Especially something like eating when we all knew I looked like a skeleton. I took a small bite into the first piece.

Nudge coughed out a bitter laugh. "Wish we had some champagne or something," she mumbled around a slice of cheese. "Good riddance." She indicated to the television, where CNN was now muted but still showing the same loop of EU burning.

Iggy's fair features were twisted in to a snarl. "Rest in misery, Mallory."

My stomach dropped and the bite of pizza I'd managed to force down threatened to come back up. "I don't think he's dead," I blurted.

There was a beat of silence in which I could feel four pairs of eyes drilling into me. I didn't look up, instead studying the way the grease from the pizza pooled and made tributaries along the cheese.

Iggy tried a tone that somehow mixed patience and frustration. "Max, the entire _building_ came down—"

"Nobody saw him—"

"Well gee, _Max,_ nobody saw _Scar_ die way back in 1994, but I'm pretty sure that fall from Pride Rock—"

"You haven't seen that guy in a fight, Iggy. These people—they aren't even people. I watched him take a bullet to the chest once. He was back a week later, doing the rope climb and beating the shit out of me. You heard the news—they saw people fleeing."

" _We_ saw people fleeing," Nudge said quietly, nervously. "Tons of them, Ig."

That feeling of panic had started to overcome me again, and I felt my palms becoming sweaty as my heartrate spiked. I intended to hold it together, intended to say something like, _We'll just have to outrun them, then!_ , but what actually came out was a strangled sort of choking sound and shaky, terrified half-sentences: "They're going to come for me again—oh, God—Jesus Christ—I can't, guys, I can't, I'm sorry—I just—"

"Max—" said Angel.

"Hey, hey, hey, hey," came Iggy's voice, and his hand was on my arm in a second. "Breathe. Lean back. You're going to give yourself a heart attack, Max." He gave me a gentle shove towards the arm of the couch and forced me into a laying position, propping my feet into his lap. When my breathing didn't slow, he sighed tiredly. "C'mon. Breathe. If you think for a second any of them are going to get to you when we're all here—"

"Of course I think that, Iggy!" I cried, shooting back up into a sitting position. I felt completely out of control—my head was still pounding, the Gasman was still unconscious, and Angel and Nudge were bruised and bloodied and staring at us with wide eyes. "Because that's what they do! Or worse, they'll take all of us—" I stopped short, throwing a hand over my heart in an attempt to stop its thundering.

 _You used to be a leader_ , some broken part of me echoed in my head. _Look at you now._

Fang was standing protectively between all of us and the door, but I could feel the anger rolling off of him in waves. This was where he and Iggy complemented each other nicely; Fang had an incredibly difficult time putting aside his own ire—especially when it came to any one of the flock's safety—and finding that tenderness he kept locked away. To his credit, his eyes were soft and sad despite his severe body language.

There was a cough from across the room that shattered the escalating tension. A messy head of white-blonde hair rose from the floor, and then Gazzy's disoriented ceil blue eyes were blinking at all of us.

A split second of time passed before Nudge had launched herself into his arms, garnering a wince and an _oof_ from the Gasman. He patted her back once, twice; then his eyes found something to focus on. His voice was raspy and tired, but still had that twinkle of mischief that had been present since he'd uttered his first word.

"Pizza?" he asked, and held his hand out for a slice.

* * *

A/N: "Gasoline" by Hasley.

Did not proofread, short chapter, not trying too hard to sound good. This is the only way you'll get chapters out of me.

(Either that or you'll have to pry them out of my cold, dead hands.)

Thanks for sticking around, I finally have a sense of direction for this story again. Stay tuned!


	17. Seventeen

_Wide oceans roar, a frightened fool stokes heatless fire  
But if you need to, keep time on me  
How could it all fall in one day?  
Were we too sure of the sun?  
If you need to, keep time on me_

* * *

SEVENTEEN

"Max, for the hundredth time, I'm _not tired_."

We were soaring high over the plains of North Dakota, headed as far west as we could make it before one of us dropped out of the sky. I had had eyes on the Gasman ever since we'd left the hotel the day before, waiting for his tough-guy façade to break with exhaustion.

We'd sought refuge at the hotel for forty-eight hours, giving all of us a little bit of time to catch up on sleep and process, and then decided that we'd better scoot before somebody—or some _thing_ —found us.

After the Gasman had woken up, we'd had a heartwarming flock reunion that helped squelch my oncoming anxiety attack. He was acting like himself, fever-free, and had eaten half a pizza within four minutes of regaining consciousness. We'd given him the scoop of how we'd escaped, he'd given me a wordless, bone-crushing hug, and then he'd sat back on his haunches on the floor and smiled that mischievous grin at us.

"So now what?"

It had been a fair question, and not one that we'd considered in our short time in the hotel room. I'd pushed the "let's go back to Massachusetts" card only to be met with forceful declinations from every single one of my family members. When I hadn't dropped it, they'd essentially held an intervention.

What stopped me wasn't any kind words or comforting gestures, but instead what Iggy, Nudge and Angel held in their backpacks: a gigantic, expandable file folder full of every single important document that had been held at the old house, an envelope of cash containing thousands of dollars, and any other small things of value that they hadn't wanted to leave behind.

Angel had roped a skinny arm around my shoulder, offering a sad smile. "We knew we weren't coming back, Max. And we're going to pick you every time, so get over it." And of course that had brought on the waterworks.

Once I was finished saturating yet another one of Fang's shirts with what seemed like endless tears, we mapped out a short-term game plan that, in all honesty, only had one goal: stay the hell away from any sort of bad guy that might be tailing us.

So far, it was going well.

"This is our second long flight of the day," I reminded Gazzy, pulling the new windbreaker I'd bought more tightly over the wool sweater that hid beneath it. The October wind was unforgiving this far north. "We want to put some distance between us and them, but not at a cost."

" _But not at a cost,_ " parroted Gazzy in his best baritone narrator voice. I shot him a glare.

"Plus," Nudge added, bumping a long wing against his, "it would just end up putting us further back in the long run."

" _Plus—_ "

Nudge let out a frustrated half-laugh and tried to whack him, who dodged swiftly out of the way and started performing big, wide barrel rolls in the air. "You're an idiot!" Nudge shouted. She dove after him, long brown curls billowing behind her. Behind me, I heard Angel and Iggy's soft tones reminiscing about the subway tunnels of New York.

For a moment, I felt like I was fourteen again, raising a ragtag group of winged mutants, trying to find our parents and hoping to stumble upon our next meal.

Except now, the stakes were a bit higher, and we were no longer naïve to the evils of the world.

Fang soared up next to me, gaze scrutinizing but not unkind.

"Before you ask, yes, Fang, I am _doing_ _okay_."

Stone-faced, Fang raised his hand to cover his heart. "I'm so offended," he said tonelessly.

I rolled my eyes. "It's been three days." A tendril of my own wet hair whipped forward into my mouth; I pulled it away and cursed the low-lying patch of stratus clouds that had been soaking us for the past few miles. "Give it a rest."

Fang snorted and flew a little bit closer to me, positioning himself a couple of inches higher so as to not bump wings. "Didn't say anything," he said defensively, holding both hands up.

His eyes were still drilling into me, though, and I had some stifled frustration that we were once again fleeing from a place that had once been safe, so I let it loose. "You don't have to," I snapped. "You just keep looking at me with those stupid, sad eyes, and I _know_ you keep thinking, _oh, God, she was tortured for five years, and she's too skinny, and she must be so_ broken, _because she was beaten and raped_ , _and oh_ no _now she has a concussion and how will she ever survive—"_

 _What are you doing?_

The words stopped coming and deep breaths huffed out of me. I refused to meet Fang's eyes but I knew they were cutting into me, no doubt alarmed at my ranting. My head was pounding.

I kept talking even though I didn't want to. "I don't need you worrying about me," I told him, tugging my hair back into place again. My eyes followed the path Gazzy and Nudge cut through the foggy sky. "We're together, right? That's all that matters. We've been kicked around since we were born, this isn't anything new." I gestured to my head.

"I'm not talking about the concussion, Max," Fang said, sounding exasperated. "I _know_ you can heal. I _know_ you can eat more than I can in one sitting, I _know_ you're going to be fine, physically."

He took a long pause, and for a moment, I thought he was done talking. The sun was setting ahead of us, its orange rays slicing paths through the fog and grey. For the first time since coming home, I appreciated the differences in this new, older Fang; the strong jaw, the way the corners of his mouth pulled downard, even when he was smiling.

Just when I was ready to give up on the conversation, Fang spoke.

"I saw how Iggy dealt with our childhoods—"

"Leave it alone, Fang! For Christ's sake, I'm _not Ig_ —"

"He was a _wreck,_ Max. He could barely leave the house, he jumped at any sudden noise, he barely slept at night. He would do laps around the house, checking to make sure all of us were in our beds." Fang shook his head once, hard. "We're all a little crazy. But it went deeper for him. And it did for you, too. Way deeper. I don't care what you think you are—invincible, indestructible, unflappable, whatever—but you're a person, Max, and what you went through was trauma. It will destroy you from the inside out if you suppress it."

Every cell in my body flushed in defense. My heart started to thrum in my chest and I said the only thing I could think of: "You don't know that."

"Don't I?" In one swift motion, he grabbed my right arm and turned it over, displaying the shiny, messy collection of scars on its underside from when I'd tried to cut out the chip on the beach when I was fourteen. My stomach dropped and I again avoided looking at him.

"And while we're on the topic, I'm going to worry about your head. Because you won't take it easy unless somebody forces you to, and that's been my job for as long as I've been alive. So _give it a rest_."

With that, he surged ahead of me, a heartbreaking Icarus flying directly into the setting sun.

* * *

"The windy city, baby!" Gazzy sang as we landed in a woodsy clearing twenty minutes or so later. We'd flown over a cabin that looked relatively abandoned and Iggy had suggested we relive the glory days of breaking and entering in the name of canned vegetables and dusty sheets.

Iggy barked out a laugh. "That's Chicago, dumbass."

Gazzy chuckled with him, trying and failing to hide a wince as he rested a hand over his stomach. He'd been quite the trooper for the past few days, but I knew that once we set up camp he would sleep for the better part of a day, at the very least.

"Seems windy enough to me," he shrugged, and the trees roared as if in agreement. "I don't think we've ever been to Seattle, have we?"

" _This_ is Seattle?" Nudge said. She peered wildly about. "Where's Grey-Sloan Memorial?"

Angel was ducked over a map and using her finger to trace a path from Michigan to Washington state. I peeked over her shoulder. "I think we're here," she said, pointing to a large green area labeled North Cascades National Park.

The cabin was well hidden behind a line of fir trees and empty, as we'd suspected, presumably locked up for the winter season.

Iggy flipped a light switch as we walked in, cracking a cynical smile as the room was flooded with light. "Is that the sweet, sweet hum of electricity?"

Gazzy let out a tired _whoop_ , stepping forward to launch himself onto the couch. "Man, I can't wait to—"

"—let me look at that festering flesh wound?" finished Iggy hopefully, and Gazzy groaned.

"It's almost healed!"

"'Almost' being the operative word." Iggy knelt next to the couch and pulled out his supplies. "You will not be going septic on my watch. Sit. Stay. Good boy."

The cabin had a kitchen, a living space, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. Angel and Nudge had dumped their belongings on the floor of the larger bedroom and were rifling through the cabinets of the kitchen, pulling out cans of vegetables and packages of instant rice.

As the two of them started to prepare a feast, I began the search for Fang, who had slipped away unnoticed.

I found him outside on the porch, leaning heavily against the railing, staring up at the starry autumn sky.

"Still a stargazer, I see."

He didn't flinch, twitch, or move at my voice. Of course he knew I'd been coming.

I leaned on the railing next to him and craned my neck upward. The constellations were vivid against the jet black expanse of space, and I knew without looking that Fang's dark, calculating eyes were tracing them.

When we were younger, right before Jeb left, Fang had gone through a phase during which he'd obsessed over space. Jeb had bought him every book he could find and they had pored over them together, Fang's intelligent brain absorbing every bit of information and storing it away.

When Jeb had left, he'd dropped it, refused to really speak about it, but I'd caught him looking at sky often enough that he'd eventually opened up to me. We'd spent countless nights together discussing the stories behind the constellations over the years.

Now he was ignoring me, though, which I guess I deserved. I'd given him a bit of attitude mid-flight earlier when he was just trying to look out for me. I knew he was still more worried than he'd ever let on, and to his credit, I didn't exactly have a great track record of taking care of myself or revealing imperative weakness.

"Cygnus," he said softly, tilting his chin toward the stars.

I looked up and squinted. Though I would never be able to pick it out without his direction, I knew it was his favorite. He'd told me the story more than once before—Phaethon, impulsive and young, begged his father to let him borrow his chariot, which he then recklessly crashed into the river. His friend, Cycnus, beside himself with grief, tried desperately to retrieve Phaethon's body in order to give him a proper burial and grant him admission to the afterlife, but was unable to reach the bottom of the river. Cycnus made a pact with Zeus: Cycnus would be turned into a swan, which enabled him to pull his friend from the depths, but slated him to a shorter and lonelier life. Zeus was moved by the selflessness of this sacrifice and granted him a place in the sky under the name of _Cygnus,_ Latin for swan.

I turned to look at him and shrugged. "I see a dipper."

"Ursa minor."

"Fang—look, I—"

"You don't get it, do you, Max?"

A long pause stretched out between us as I waited for him to say something more. He grinded his teeth for a moment and then turned to look at me, face hard with concealed emotion.

"We lost you. You have no idea what that was like. Angel didn't talk for weeks. Nudge cried for a month straight. Gazzy didn't leave his room. I—"

The railing splintered in his hands as he turned away again. The ridges of his knuckles were white in the moonlight.

"I'll die before I let them take you again," he said simply. "But if you don't take care of yourself, then it doesn't matter how far we run from them. We'll lose you anyway."

The deep blues of his irises were black in the darkness as he continued mapping out the constellations. I thought of Cycnus and Phaethon and couldn't help but wonder if Fang was so drawn to this story because he saw me in the recklessness of Phaethon—because he knew someday I too would be bones at the bottom of a river and he'd be left to pick up the pieces.

I swallowed thickly and nodded, reaching a hand out to graze his arm. I opened my mouth to speak and closed it again when I found I wasn't sure what I intended to say.

Silently, he took one, two, three steps forward. My face was eye-level with his jaw; I could feel his breath on me as he raised a single finger and pressed it to my lips. "Don't," he said simply, and he disappeared through the front door.

* * *

All six of them were huddled in the small living room, a fire crackling in the fireplace, bowls scraped clean of vegetables and rice. It was the safest Fang had felt in days, but the topic of conversation left a pit in his stomach: what was their next move?

"We need to get rid of them, once and for all," Iggy said from his spot on the floor next to the Gasman.

"When have we ever actually gotten _rid_ of them, though?" Gazzy asked uneasily. A hand ghosted over his abdomen, where Iggy had placed a fresh dressing hours before. "We thought it was over with after the School and Itex went down, but then…"

"CNN hasn't stopped covering it," Angel said. She was huddled on the loveseat next to Nudge. "Maybe the government will get them."

Fang snorted. "Yeah, like that mindset has ever worked out for us before."

Max was curled up on her side on the couch next to him, her head pillowed on his thigh. He dropped a hand to her head and ran his fingers through her hair, bouncing his knee ever so slightly. "You've been quiet," he murmured.

No response.

"She's knocked out," said Gazzy.

Iggy's face was grave. "Good. She needs as much rest as she can get." He raked a hand across his face, leaving his cheeks red and his blind eyes tired. "Cara told me she's never seen somebody so emaciated before."

"Well, what do you expect?" said Nudge. "You saw that place, you've heard her stories—"

"I know, I know," said Iggy. "It's just strange. Growing up I always saw her as invincible."

"Yeah, well, you haven't been proven wrong yet," Fang muttered.

Angel shifted in her seat. Fang met her eyes—they were fierce, piercing. "She loves you, you know."

Iggy snickered loudly. "Yeah, no _shit_. And we all know Fang has had eyes for Max since, oh, I don't know—"

"That's not what this is about," Fang said, pushing his emotions as deep as he possibly could. Regardless of how he felt, the priority now was for Max to heal, to feel safe, to be protected. "She won't take care of herself, you know she won't, she never has—"

"Well, that's what you're here for," Nudge said brightly. She bounced up from her seat and started collecting the dirty dishes. "That's how it's always been. Max takes care of us, you take care of Max."

Fang studied her, watched the steady rise and fall of her chest, appreciated the peaceful expression on her face—one he only ever saw when she was sleeping. A sigh escaped him and he rubbed her shoulder gently.

Iggy stood up from his spot on the floor and draped a quilt over her, tucking it around her back and feet. "I'll take first watch," he said. When Fang opened his mouth to protest, Iggy raised an eyebrow. "Do you really want to risk moving and waking her up?"

"I can take one," Nudge called from the kitchen.

"No," Iggy and Fang said at the same time.

The faucet stopped running and Nudge appeared in the doorway, a wash cloth in one hand, the other on her hip. "Excuse me, I am _not_ eleven years old anymore," she said fiercely. "I can make my own decisions, and if I say I want to—"

"Okay, okay," said Iggy, raising a hand. "You can have second, then. That at least gives Max some more downtime before Fang has to jostle her. Sorry, Nudge."

"Forgot that I'm not just your kid sister anymore?"

Iggy extended one long arm and rustled her hair, chuckling when it elicited a frustrated growl from Nudge. "You'll always be my kid sister."

* * *

Filler chapter. Thanks for reading! Please review if you're still following along.

"If You Need To, Keep Time on Me" – Fleet Foxes


	18. Eighteen

_Who's in the shadows? Who's ready to play?  
Are we the hunters or are we the prey?  
There's no surrender and there's no escape  
Are we the hunters or are we the prey?_

* * *

EIGHTEEN

One moment, I was sprinting, trying to flee, wings twitching against my back, and the next I was sitting upright, panting and attempting to catch my breath as a gentle hand rubbed circles against my spine.

"You were having a nightmare." Gazzy. My eyes sought his in the darkness and he gave me a sad half-smile. "It's okay—I get them too."

It took me a moment to remember where I was. _Cabin, Washington, living room_ … A dying fire was crackling in the fireplace, and Gazzy was kneeling in front of where I had apparently fallen asleep on the couch.

Outside the pulled curtains, I could tell sunrise was less than an hour away.

 _Who's on watch?_ "Is anyone—"

"Fang, Iggy, and Nudge are switching off."

I puffed out the deep breath I'd been holding. Nodded once. A headache rolled behind my eyes, angry and incessant. "Thanks for waking me up."

"It looked like a bad one."

"What are you doing awake?"

He averted his eyes and shrugged. A nightmare for him too, then.

I threw back the musty quilt that had been folded over me. I didn't remember falling asleep—we'd been talking after dinner, trying to decide what our next step was from here: start a life on the run, or try to hunt down the boss and whoever was left that had been associated with EU? Turn to the government for help, or continue to distrust them and work on our own? Switch countries? Develop new identities?

I rubbed a hand over my face and sighed. "Did we make any headway on the plan?"

Gazzy rose to his feet and then sat on the couch, leaning his back against the arm across from me. He propped his long legs up and wrapped his arms around them. "I think the overwhelming consensus is that we need to kick the shit out of the bad guys."

I felt the ghost of a smile creep onto my face. "Why do I feel like I've been trying to do that for the last two decades?"

"Sounds about right," said Gazzy.

In the firelight, his face was a deep orange, the planes of his cheeks and forehead standing out strongly against the mess of curly white-blonde hair atop his head. By and large, he was the same little boy I helped raise—mischievous, funny, sensitive, kind—but some part of life, or of growing up, or a combination of the two, had hardened him. Turned him into a man, at age thirteen.

"When did you get so grown up?"

"Oh, God, not this," Gazzy groaned. "Max, for the love of all that's holy—"

"C'mon, Gazzy." A smile spread across my face again. "Let me have my moment. I missed almost five years of this. You know you and Angel were my babies growing up, and now look at you." I gestured to his long limbs, his strong facial features. "You'll be taller than Iggy, at the rate you're going. You're almost as old as I was when all of this crap started."

Gazzy frowned at this, his shoulders slumping. He averted his eyes. "Yeah," he said glumly.

"Hey," I said. I reached an arm out to dust my fingertips along the outside of his arm. He looked up at me, blue eyes full of fear and something else I couldn't place. "I remember what it feels like to be a teenager and have the entire world on your shoulders. To have to _save the world_. You're not alone, no matter how much it might feel that way sometimes."

"How did you do it?" he asked. "You were in charge of all of us—I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing half the time, or even how to help, and I'm not even the leader—"

I snorted. "And you think I do? There's a reason the saying is 'fake it until you make it,' Gaz. Those of us who don't make it just keep faking it with our fingers crossed."

There was a moment of silence and then Gazzy pulled his gaze up to meet mine again. There were tears pooled in the corners of his eyes and I felt a sliver of my heart fracture. "I'm sorry I couldn't save you," he said in a whisper, and as he blinked the tears fell onto his bent knees. "Back then, and even the other day, when they took us."

"Hey," I said again, and leaned forward to place a fingertip under his chin. "I didn't save you either, did I? I'd say we're even."

" _Max_ ," he said exasperatedly, looking guilty, "just let me—"

"Shut up, please," I said as gently as I could. "Gazzy. Look at me. No— _look at me_." His eyes finally left the couch and met mine again. He was still fighting back tears. "Listen to me. I've been in charge around here for as long as I can remember. My record for saving people leaves a lot to be desired. _No_ ," I said as he opened his mouth to interrupt. "Listen. Angel was kidnapped on my watch. Ari almost killed Fang on my watch. I tried to saw my arm open on a beach. I am not perfect. Nobody is."

I huffed a deep breath and looked over my shoulder; I recognized Iggy and Fang's silhouettes on the deck in the moonlight through the drapes. "I don't imagine it was easy for anyone to move on after they took me. But Iggy and Fang stepped up. You all did. Because even if you couldn't save me—even if you couldn't stop them from taking me—you had to move on. For each other."

I leaned forward on the couch again, cupping my hand around his cheek. His hair was longer than I ever remembered seeing it; I tucked a curl behind his ear and smiled. "All that matters is that you try. No matter what—if you're getting your ass beat, if life is kicking you while you're down, if you're stuck in a dog crate with no way out." I grinned as wide as I could and pulled his chin up so he was forced, again, to make eye contact. "All that matters is that you don't give up. Okay?"

Either because he agreed with me or because he was afraid I'd get angry if he tried to apologize again, Gazzy sniffled and nodded. I smiled again and ruffled his hair. "Good."

My feet grazed the cold hardwood of the floor and I shivered, forcing them down despite the urge to curl back up under the quilt on the couch. As I stood, my head began to throb again, and I pulled a hand to my temple. "God, you think these people have ibuprofen or something kicking around?"

The front door creaked open, welcoming a gush of freezing autumn air and Iggy's pale face as he wiggled his eyebrows over his blind eyes. "Do I hear the mellifluous croon of my favorite concussed mutant birdkid?"

"That's mutant bird _lady_ to you," I grumbled, fishing through the hall cabinet until I found a bottle of acetaminophen. I cranked the top off and shoved three into my mouth before realizing I hadn't even poured myself a glass of water.

When I turned to walk into the kitchen, I instead walked directly into Fang's dark form, which had evidently materialized out of absolutely nowhere in complete silence.

A smile cracked at the corner of his mouth. He wordlessly held up a cup of coffee. I could smell the morning air on his flannel.

"You're lucky I like you," I muttered.

"Rest well, Sleeping Beauty?"

I accepted the mug from his hands and took a sip. "You shouldn't have let me fall asleep during that conversation."

He snorted. "Like I could've stopped you. You were dead on your feet from the moment we landed out front. You needed to rest, Max. Your head is still healing."

"I'm fine," I snapped. Subconsciously, I brought a hand up to rub my forehead, only noticing when a smirk cut its way across Fang's lips. "What's the plan?"

"The _plan,_ " Fang said, flicking the bathroom light on and leading me in behind him, "is that you're going to take a long, hot shower, I'm going to wake the kids up, and Iggy's going to try to put something together to eat. And then we'll all discuss where we're going to go from here."

Fang spun the dial on the tub and pulled the stopper. A steady stream of water spat from the shower head.

I screwed my face up into the most stubborn, frustrated mug I could imagine. Fang returned to the room with a small stack of towels and sighed when he saw my expression.

"It's probably going to involve a trip back to School territory," he said lowly. "Is that enough information to hold you over for twenty minutes?"

 _School territory?_ A million questions slammed into my brain at once; my calculated face of stubbornness must've melted away into something much less intimidating and far more idiotic, because Fang laughed as he closed the door behind him.

* * *

"There wasn't anything, y'know, less…?"

"What, Max? _Stylish?_ Gender-appropriate?"

There was a full-length mirror in room the girls had slept in; I was standing in front of it and frowning at my reflection, which was donned in a pair of maroon corduroy pants and a knitted pink sweater with white flowers embroidered into it.

"Is this considered _stylish?_ "

"Would you care if it was?"

"Listen, I just need something more _practical—"_

"Here," Angel said, brandishing a navy bundle of fabric as she walked into the room. She tossed it into my hands. "It's a long sleeve and a sweatshirt. Found it in one of the other dressers. Looks like the family's got a teenage boy who's exactly your size!"

"Wouldn't be the first," I muttered.

"And won't be the last!" Nudge said brightly. Once I was in the long sleeve, she cut long slits in the back, then did the same once I'd pulled the sweatshirt over it. "Didn't take you for a Mariners fan."

"Are there any, like, jeans? Corduroys aren't exactly my—"

"Ugh, here," Nudge said, flinging a pair my way along with a belt. "You are a fashion disaster."

There were two loud knocks on the door and then Iggy's slightly aggravated voice. "Are we done playing dress-up Barbie in there? We've got some pretty important crap to go over, you know."

"And also oatmeal!" said Gazzy.

"Can't say no to that," I said. "Let's go, team."

The three of us met them in the living room. Iggy handed us each a bowl of oatmeal, full of dried fruit, brown sugar, walnuts, and whatever else he found, it looked like, and we settled around the embers as we ate.

Iggy and Fang stood in front of the fireplace, perfect opposites but similar all the same: Iggy, fair and open; Fang, dark and mysterious; both tall, both stoic, both perceptive.

Both looking very much like they were in charge.

I felt a twinge of something that I didn't quite recognize, but tried to bury it as they spoke.

"So, as we were discussing last night," Iggy started, pacing in front of the fireplace, "running doesn't seem to be the most desirable idea, considering our track record."

Fang nodded, wringing his hands together as Iggy paced. "I think we're all pretty sick of thinking we're finally done with all of this, but then—"

"—we aren't."

"So, what do we do?" Angel asked. "EU burned to the ground, we all saw it on the news. Even if we go back to the site, I doubt anyone's going to be there. The government hasn't found any evidence to pin _anybody._ "

"They won't, either. They might've been assholes, but they weren't stupid. There's no way any of those losers are still kicking around there," Gazzy said. His face was set in a scowl. "Those cowards are underground. I guarantee it."

"Not EU," Fang said. "Max found out while she was in there that a lot of the employees had come from the School after it went down. So instead we're going to—"

"Death Valley," Iggy finished.

A silence blanketed over the small living room. The fire chose that moment to crackle lifelessly; Fang turned around and threw another log on the flame, probably expecting a discussion that would last longer than the coals would allow.

"How is that any different from EU?" Gazzy asked quietly. "The School's gone. It's not like there are old Whitecoats just, like, sitting around where it was—"

Nudge shook her head. "When we were looking for you guys, I found a ton of satellite labs around where the School had been. Nothing confirmed, but there's a good chance that we can find an old Whitecoat or two—or even a maintenance guy—and try to figure out if there's some sort of other base, a place that we can take out once and for all."

The five of them continued to discuss pros and cons, but I felt myself fading from the conversation, instead filling with a bit of blind panic at the thought of all of it—the thought of returning to the site of the School, which had started all of this, and actively seeking somebody who had done those things—putting us all at risk of recapture, of retorture.

I put a halt to the crazed thoughts, instead searching for anything else to grab on to that wouldn't send me into a full blown anxiety attack—the next most readily available emotion was rage at the idea that this was Fang and Iggy leading a conversation, Fang and Iggy making a major flock decision.

Fang and Iggy. And not _me._

"Yo, Max," came Iggy's voice. "You with us?"

"Was this something we were going to discuss?"

The words came out of me before I had a chance to really consider them, but they were true nonetheless—I'd been the leader since we were kids, but here Fang and Iggy were, rattling off plans, telling me what our next step was—

"We are discussing it." Iggy's voice was patient, but after so many years of butting heads I could tell it was a short-lived patience, the kind that expired after a moment of arguing—unluckily for both of us, I was in an arguing mood.

"Doesn't sounds like much of a discussion," I fired back. "Sounds like your minds are already made up, and we're just here for the ride."

"Pretty status quo for us, then."

" _Iggy_." Fang's voice was an impossibly low growl; it was a tone he often used in warning, though typically not with family.

"What are you trying to say?" I shouted. I shot up from my place on the floor, barely noticing the oatmeal bowl tumbling from my lap and shattering in a mess of ceramic on the hardwood. I found myself nose-to-chest with Iggy, whose feathers had puffed out from behind the olive sweater he wore. I cranked my neck up to meet his eyes; they were centered just beyond my line of sight, unseeing and frigid.

"I'm _saying_ that this isn't a Maxocracy anymore. We're not kids anymore, we need to make decisions _together_ —"

"I'm _sorry,_ w _as_ this _together_?"

"Were we not in the process of—"

"Oh, don't give me that," I spat. "I know what a decision already made sounds like, Iggy, I'm not a fucking moron."

"Because you've made about a million of them yourself!"

"Guys—"

"Don't!" Iggy and I both snapped at Gazzy. I took a step closer to Iggy, so our bodies were touching; my neck was at almost a total right angle to see up the planes of his face.

"You are not the boss of me," Iggy said. His words were absolutely ice-cold and steely; he sounded oddly disconnected from what he was saying. "Or him, or them, or _anyone_. People are dying. Innocent people—like Cara, like that little girl's mom could have, back in that clearing. So if you want to stay behind, be my guest. But we're going."

A few things happened after that, most of which I still can't remember—a hand found my shoulder; a small one, a soft one—and then I was forcing a body into the wall of the cabin and a flurry of activity and sounds and chaos broke out behind me.

"Max, _Max_ —!"

 _Crack!_ My fist hit something solid and then I was being pulled backward by my sweatshirt, I tried to force my wings out but arms were already wrapped tightly around my back and I couldn't budge them free—I cried out, but then there was a new body, and it smelled like _cedar and cotton and—_

I stopped moving and opened my eyes: Fang's face was millimeters from mine, his own eyes searching mine for something—maybe coherence or sanity, I couldn't be sure—and he sighed in relief when I met his gaze.

"You can let her go, Ig, she's fine—"

" _Fine?_ " Iggy said, voice octaves higher than normal. The arms around my back tightened; my eyes flicked down to see Iggy's freckled hands secured around my chest.

Angel's trembling voice came next, "I'm okay, Iggy—"

Gazzy, next: "Angel—"

"Iggy," Fang's voice again, harsh, deep, "let her go. I've got her."

Iggy's arms retreated from around me slowly. I blinked once and surveyed the room—my body was heaving with ragged gasps; Angel had a hand clutched over her eye, shaking off the Gasman's nervous hands.

Nudge appeared on my right. She looked terrified. "Max…"

"Angel," I said, and I started to cry.

I could remember a time where crying was a rarity for me—there were what seemed like millions of years of my life before this one wherein the flock had never seen me cry, had never seen the slightest of cracks in the imperturbable protector mask that I'd perfected.

That time was long gone, I realized, as I pulled my hands over my eyes and felt Fang's hand on my shoulder.

Instead of Fang's welcoming scent enveloping me, however, it was the floral, innocent scent of Angel that pulled me in. Her skinny arms met at my back and rubbed big circles between my wings. I cried and cried, trying to find words but only able to choke out defeated sounds.

"I know you didn't mean it," Angel said, sounding shaken. "Max, I'm fine, I've had worse—it's _okay_."

"A—Angel—" I spluttered.

"Stop," she said, gentler than a sea breeze. "I am _fine_. And I love you, and everything is going to be fine."

An indeterminate amount of time passed—Gazzy summoned a bag of ice for Angel's eye, Fang pulled me into his side, I continued to apologize until Angel threatened my safety if I didn't stop. I settled onto the couch, feeling like a monumental asshole. I had already exhausted myself, and the day had just started.

There was a beat of silence followed by a big breath by Iggy as he sat next to me on the couch. "Max." He was tender now, his body language far less murderous. "Look. I get it. Things have changed. Every—everything has changed. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry." His voice cracked and he shivered, lowering a hand to my cheek. "But we need to get rid of these guys. They'll just get you again, and keep you, and next time we won't get you back."

He took my hand, tracing it with his fingers; I had a sudden flashback to a day over a decade ago within the walls of the School, shortly after he'd been blinded—he had mapped my calluses and the creases of my palms, and neither of us had said a word when his tears had started falling on my skin.

I offered Iggy a smile that I know he couldn't see but could surely sense. I let it color my words as I spoke: "Let's go to Death Valley."

* * *

"Game of Survival" – Ruelle

Promise I'm still writing. As you all know, real life gets in the way this time of year. Had to almost force this chapter out, but here it is.


	19. Nineteen

_I_ _know it's hard, it's harder than we knew  
I know you've been waiting longer than you thought you would  
_ _Stay awake  
_ _Tell the night it's dark, tell your eyes they're tired  
_ _Tell the air it's cold; I can't say anymore if we'll get what we hope for_

* * *

NINETEEN

It didn't take us long to pack up our things (and a few borrowed items from, as Nudge called them, our "Air BnB hosts") and begin the long, southward flight toward the California-Nevada border. Iggy pulled me aside shortly after we took off, tugging me back behind the rest of the flock. I knew what was coming before he even opened his mouth.

"Iggy, you don't have to apologize."

"No?" He popped an eyebrow and I saw a whisper of a smile at the corners of his mouth. "Really feels like I do."

"You don't," I insisted.

"Is this a test? I thought this was something girls reserved for their boyfriends, and honestly, Max, I'm flattered, but you're really not my type, plus I think Fang might actually kill me—"

The rest of the group was a little ways ahead of us, but Fang's head turned a fraction of an inch and I knew he'd overheard. I felt my face flush what must've been a brilliant shade of maroon. "Spare me," I begged.

He laughed. A big one, a genuine one. One of his long arms reached out and he whacked my shoulder. "Listen, I really am sorry. I got out of hand—you know how I can get—"

"Oh, I sure do—"

"—and I know how _you_ can get," he finished pointedly. "I care about you, and you're always going to be the boss around here, but things changed when you left. Because they _had_ to."

"I get it. Really. You don't have to explain yourself to me."

"No—listen to me. Seriously. And not that thing where you pretend to listen but actually write off whatever I'm saying as me being an idiot."

I cracked a smile at that.

"When you left, I was lost. I mean—we were all lost. But I…"

"Iggy," I said, and I reached out my hand to grasp his. "I know."

The wind was whipping in our ears, the sky looked ready to open up with rain at any moment, and the circumstances definitely weren't the best, but I couldn't picture a more perfect, touching moment between Iggy and I. It was oddly personal, almost uncomfortably so; Iggy and I had always butted heads, always loved each other like siblings, but I don't know that I had ever realized just how important we were to each other.

He was truly my brother, in a way that Fang never could be.

He swallowed thickly and sniffed a couple of times before nodding and offering me a crooked smile. "Christ, why do you always bring out my weepy side?"

"Because you _loooooove_ me," I crooned.

"Yeah, yeah," he said, and surged forward toward the flock. "C'mon. Looks like they're going to leave us behind."

Hours later, we'd put over a thousand miles between the murky skies of Washington and were circling over the dry, cracked land of California. None of us were excited to return to Death Valley—it had been years since any of us had flown over the miles of desert that surrounded it—but the change in climate was a welcome one.

For some of us.

"Jesus," muttered Fang, trying to peel off his windbreaker mid-flight with minimal success. Ever since we were little, Fang had despised the heat. I often joked that he belonged in an igloo in the Arctic. Sweat beaded along his forehead and he looked frazzled and un-Fanglike. "How is it possible that this is the same country?"

"Welcome to the U-S-of-A, baby, where we have biomes of all shapes and sizes," Iggy said. He'd tied his own windbreaker around his waist; it flapped in the air. I had no idea how he'd gotten it off and decided not to bother asking.

"The sun feels good, though," Nudge said. "It's gotta be, what, seventy degrees?"

Angel swooped a couple yards below us and surveyed the landscape before coming back up. "This looks familiar," she said. "I recognize this patch of desert—are we close?"

"Better than," said Fang. He pointed a long finger toward the ground below us, where an old chain link fence stood. It would've looked out of place if it weren't for the giant plot of ruins within it. "We're here."

Per tradition, I angled myself to the ground first—I was unsure if this was a coincidence or something planned by Fang and Iggy to keep me under the impression I was in charge—and once I confirmed that there were no land mines, bad guys, or bombs, I motioned for the others to follow.

Nudge landed in a cloud of dust, coughing and spluttering as she shook out the front of her shirt. "Yuck."

Angel and the Gasman landed behind her, followed by Iggy and finally Fang, whose scrutinizing gaze did a thorough sweep of the landscape. He turned to Iggy, who immediately sensed the gaze on him and shook his head.

"Nothing live here," he said. He lowered to his knees and pressed an ear to the clay, shaking his head again. "We're alone."

I walked forward toward the old concrete foundation, kicking a slab of metal as I did. I don't know what I had hoped to find—maybe a man in a white lab coat, standing with a sign that said "I'm in charge, kill me"?—but whatever it was, it certainly wasn't there.

The six of us split up and walked around the perimeter, inspecting old pieces of Sheetrock and other rubble that remained from the blast. A family of coyotes seemed to have made a home in one of the more blocked off areas—Fang recognized the tracks in the sand. Luckily for us, they weren't around.

"Guess this is a bust," said Nudge after a while. "No biggie, though. If we go somewhere with WiFi, I can pull up some of those laboratory names and addresses and we can try there."

Behind me, I heard soda cans cracking open. Iggy shouted that it was lunch time, and the flock let out whoops of agreement. I wandered a bit further.

My gut was certain that there was something to uncover here, despite the obvious reality that this was irrational. The School had been gone for years. Just because EU happened to burn didn't mean anything. These scientists had been around long enough (and were evil enough) to have the routine down: build, torture and study, get blown up, move on before being discovered; rinse, lather, repeat.

But still—there was something about this place, something about these ruins, that sat heavily in my bones.

Fang was calling me from the picnic spot a hundred yards or so away. As I turned to call back to him, I caught it with the corner of my eye: a mirror on a piece of stone in what looked to be the center of the rubble.

There was a piece of paper pinned beneath a scrap of metal. The mirror flashed a ray of light in the sun. The display certainly didn't look like it had been there for six years: the paper was unruffled, the mirror unscratched.

Recent. And _intentional_.

"Hey," I called behind me. Fang's head turned almost immediately. His eyes darted down to the ray of light given off by the mirror and back up to search my face. Moments later, he was jogging towards me.

I sank to my knees and looked at the paper—it was a receipt from a general store. The only items purchased had been a bottle of Tylenol, two boxes of gauze, and a twenty-ounce bottle of Coke.

The store was in Michigan in a town called Melstrand. It was dated for November 12th at seven in the morning.

At the bottom, in messy cursive: _Find her._

My mind started racing.

Fang appeared behind me wordlessly. He raised an eyebrow as he wiped his brow with the back of his hand. "What's up?"

"What's today's date?" I asked. The words were frantic.

"Sixteenth, why?" He bent at the waist and picked up the mirror, then searched the skies, probably trying to find a sniper or some sort of other watchful eye.

"God dammit. They put this here. They knew we'd come. Shit. _Shit."_

"Gotta fill me in, Max," he said, urgency coloring his usually calm words.

I thrusted the receipt at him and spun around, raking my eyes across the horizon in a panic. "It's dated for the twelfth but there's no way it's been here that long—they knew we'd come, they've got to be watching us." I whistled loudly; four heads turned my way across the clearing. I jerked a thumb in the air and shouted, "U and A!"

The four of them were in the sky almost immediately, sandwiches and wrappers forgotten on the ground. Fang stuffed the receipt in his pocket and grabbed my hand.

Once we were back in the air, a steady stream of curses flew from my mouth.

"What happened?" Iggy asked urgently. "I'm telling you, I didn't hear any electricity—that place is completely deserted."

"Yeah, well, not completely," I spat. "They were fucking expecting us. We walked right into it."

"Who the hell is _they_?" asked Gazzy.

From behind me came Fang's voice. "There was a receipt there from a store in Melstrand, Michigan. They left it next to a mirror so the light would draw attention to it. Somebody wrote 'find her' on the bottom."

"Where the hell is that?" asked Gazzy.

"Twenty bucks says it's in the upper peninsula of Michigan, right near where EU was."

"'Find her,' though?" Iggy repeated.

"Who the hell is _she_?"

"That's what has me hung up," Fang said, ignoring the Gasman. "If they were after us, wouldn't they have written something more threatening?"

"What if that's what they want us to think?"

"This is a little paranoid, even for you, Max," said Iggy.

"Oh, _excuse me,_ " I spat _._ "My paranoia has saved your skinny white ass more times than I can—"

Iggy raised his hands in innocence. "Hey! I'm not trying to fight. I'm just saying."

Angel cocked her head to the side. "Doesn't seem like them not to just attack us, though. Like, if they were there."

"Nudge," Fang interrupted, flying toward her and carefully transferring the paper into her hand. "Who wrote this?"

Nudge took the receipt and her eyes glazed over almost immediately. Every fiber of my being was wound tight, waiting for words I was certain would come:

 _Greasy black ponytail._

 _Crabgrass green eyes._

 _Mallory._

Instead:

"A guy," she said finally. "Tall. Brown eyes. Brown hair. Doesn't look very evil."

"Brown eyes?" I pressed. "You're positive? Not green? Does he have a ponytail?"

I met Fang's eyes. Instead of reassurance, I saw worry. He looked to Nudge.

She shook her head, though. "Nah. They're brown. Short hair, kind of military looking. He looks, I dunno, thirty? I don't recognize him."

Angel furrowed her brow and looked at Nudge. She shook her head as well. "Neither do I."

"Think you could sketch him, Nudge?"

"I mean, I—I don't know, I could try, I guess," she said nervously.

I smiled at her encouragingly. In my flustered state, I had worried the younger kids—Angel and Gazzy were looking at me apprehensively as well. "All I'll ask of you. You know that."

She offered me a small smile.

"Let's land," Fang said. "We need to regroup."

"And eat," said Gazzy.

Iggy let out a loud laugh and swooped over to high-five the Gasman. Nudge looked absolutely disgusted and yelled, "We _just_ ate!"

"I didn't get to finish my sandwich!"

"Glad to see your appetite's back," I said with a smile. "Fang's right. Let's land."

* * *

Twenty minutes later we were huddled in a family-owned sub shop just outside of Las Vegas. While the flock tore into their second lunches of the day, I inhaled my first, prompting Fang to return to the counter to order me a second sandwich.

"Glad to see _your_ appetite's back," said Iggy with a grin. Then, a bit more quietly, "How's your head?"

The dull throb that I'd managed to ignore forced itself to the front of my skull, pounding behind my eyes. I sighed. "Still hurts," I admitted.

"You should be resting," he muttered.

I snorted. "Fat chance."

"Soon," he said back, and I could tell it was a promise.

"Hopefully we can find this guy," said Nudge, waving the receipt in her free hand as she sketched on a menu with a Sharpie in the other. Her pesto-tomato-mozzarella-whatever had been reduced to mere crumbs on her paper plate. "Maybe he'll give you some Tylenol."

Iggy furrowed his brows. "Tylenol?"

"The only things on the receipt were Tylenol, gauze, and Coke," I said. "Why, you think that's significant?"

"It was the morning after we blew up EU, right?"

"Gotta be," said Gazzy through a mouthful of pastrami. "Angel, you counted back the days, right?"

Angel nodded, gathering her trash into a pile in front of her.

"It's got to be somebody who was there then, right? Who made it out? And needed some painkillers and caffeine?"

Of course. It was obvious. I let out a sardonic chuckle and nodded. "Yeah, I guess that would make a ton of sense."

Iggy frowned. "But then they came all the way here…"

"That's what makes a little less sense." I slid the receipt out of Nudge's hand again and studied it; it was in great condition despite a few little dimples here and there, probably left by grains of sand digging into it. "This thing looks like it was there for hours, tops. They must've been there _today._ But how they knew _we'd_ be there _…"_

Iggy reached his hand out silently for the receipt. I placed it in his palm and he started dusting his fingers over it.

Suddenly, he stopped, eyebrows shooting into his hairline. "Wait," he said. "You didn't tell me there were indents on it."

"Huh?" I said through a mouth of turkey and cheese. I swallowed and shrugged. "I figured it was just from being crumpled in a pocket or something."

Iggy shook his head vigorously, his fingers now moving in a calculated fashion over the receipt. I could see the divots he was talking about in the light.

Fang settled next to me, depositing my second turkey sandwich on the table. Suddenly, my appetite was runner up to Iggy's intense expression.

Fang, perceptive as always, felt the intense shift of attention in the group instantaneously. His gaze fell on the scrap of paper in Iggy's hand. "What's up?"

"There's markings on the receipt," I said. "What is it, Ig? A cipher?"

"Even better," Iggy said, grinning. "It's Braille."

An intangible weight crashed over me like a ton of bricks. Braille. The pessimist in me hated this fact—somebody knew that Iggy was with us, that one of us was blind. It was strategic placement.

 _Find her._

Gazzy, on the other hand, let out a whoop of victory. "Oh, _fuck_ yeah!"

"What does it say?" Angel said, leaning in.

"B-I-O-L-I-F-E," he spelled. I snatched the Sharpie from Nudge and started writing on the back of my hand.

"BioLife," I repeated. I rifled through every single part of my memory but found nothing. "BioLife. What does that mean?"

"Oh!" Nudge cried, head shooting up from her sketch to steal the marker back. "BioLife—I remember that name, it's one of the satellite labs."

"And a name," Iggy said. "Emily."

A thick silence swept over us. "Emily," I said. "Emily. Emily. Anyone?"

"I can't remember any Emilys," said Angel, scrunching her face up.

I craned my neck to look at Fang expectantly. He shook his head.

"If Fang doesn't remember, then there's no way we ever met one," said Gazzy.

"Emily," I repeated. My brain tried to summon images of every female Whitecoat I'd ever seen at the School but all I could see was blurred features and flashes of light in my mind's eye.

"Well, it's not the best I've ever done, but here," said Nudge, and she slid the menu she'd sketched on across the table. "I couldn't really do much shading with the Sharpie. And his eyes are all wrong—he's got these deep eyes. Y'know, like the kind that have seen some shit."

"So like ours, then," Gazzy snorted.

But I was only half listening; my eyes were fixed on Nudge's drawing. I met her gaze and instantaneously, I knew the exact eyes she was talking about—the precise way they took you in, the valleys of chocolate brown that seemed to go on for miles in the sad planes of his face.

Fang sucked in a breath to my right and I knew he had connected the dots.

"Charlie," we said together.

He was alive. I was certain he'd died in the explosion, but here was proof that he'd somehow made it out, somehow knew we'd go looking for answers. Somehow knew so much more about us than I'd ever considered.

 _Find her,_ he'd written. But who was Emily? Could we trust either of them?

How much did they know?

A loud _bang_ sounded across the restaurant I looked over Iggy's shoulder and barely had time to process what I was seeing: the door slamming against the wall as it flew open and four large men in combat attire, hoisting semi-automatic weapons. Without thinking, I dove across the table and shoved Iggy sideways in the booth, knocking both the Gasman and Nudge over in the process. Next to me, Fang curled his body over Angel, and then hardwood was exploding behind our heads as bullet after bullet was embedded into the paneling.

"Thought it was getting a little slow around here," Iggy said with a weak, half-hearted laugh. "Shall we?"

* * *

"Stay Awake" - Joseph

 _A/N: Two updates? In one month? It's a Christmas miracle. I'm back in the swing of things, and we're in the home stretch here. I'd say we're probably going to land around 25 chapters - I've already actually gotten the ending written, it's just a matter of how best to get from here to there._

 _I realize I haven't been the most reliable updater, but if you're still reading, I'd love to hear from you. Special thanks to **Flowersocks2137** for always leaving their thoughts, you're keeping me going!_


	20. Twenty

_Some people got the real problems, some people out of luck  
Some people think I can solve them, Lord heavens above  
I'm only human after all  
Don't put the blame on me_

* * *

TWENTY

The words had just left Iggy's lips when the middle of the sub shop exploded, and like the flick of a switch, my world went completely silent.

Our booth was bolted to the ground, but the force of the blast pitched me from my seat. Suddenly, we were a pile of flock members underneath the table. A body landed on top of mine, and when I looked, I saw Fang's worried face through the smoke and debris, his hands protectively over my head.

 _Stay down_ , his lips said, and my skull was throbbing too badly to do otherwise.

Across from me, huddled awkwardly against the wall, Iggy was clasping a hand tightly over the side of his head. Bright red blood flowing between his fingers. My nostrils filled with the scent of fire and copper and _battle,_ and I was suddenly transported back to the time of fourteen-year-old Max with a chip on her shoulder.

After a few moments without a second explosion, Fang pulled himself off me and crawled to Iggy, who looked more disoriented than I ever remembered seeing him. His eyes were squeezed shut and I was sure that he was just as temporarily deafened as I was, something that typically sent him into a panic.

I laid eyes on the rest of the flock. Full of shrapnel, covered in dust, worse for the wear, but alive.

I still couldn't hear anything, but I saw the Gasman's lips asking Nudge, _Are you okay?_ She nodded apprehensively back.

An unbridled rage shot through me at our attackers, at the world, at everything—the flock had found their peace, they had had _lives._ And now we were getting bombed in a restaurant.

It would never be over.

I shoved myself to my feet, finding my balance despite the pressure behind my eyes. Through the smoke, I saw flashes of orange—bursts from guns—and a true fire raging somewhere beyond it. I crouched low to the ground and started crawling toward the source of the chaos.

My hand landed in something warm and wet and a lightning-hot surge of adrenaline rushed through me when I realized it was a puddle of blood. A body was strewn across the ground next to it, mangled and broken, and I had to bite my lip to keep from gagging. It was a young guy—probably not much older than me—dressed in construction apparel and clearly on his lunch break from a job site. he'd obviously been too close to whatever exploded; his lower abdomen and legs had taken most of the force.

Next to him, covered in splatters of blood, was a hard hat and an iPhone. Without thinking, I dove for both, thrusting the hat on top of my own head and jamming the phone in my pocket.

Then I pushed forward.

I could sense Fang behind me, so as I plowed onward into the enemies, I dodged and ducked—Fang's foot, as I knew it would, kicked out powerfully through the settling dust. A satisfying _crack_ sounded in the space; a body crumbled before us. Fang stomped hard on him once more as an afterthought.

It was something like coming home, fighting with Fang again.

A shadow appeared to my right and I spun and shot out a hard right hook. I bit back a shriek as my fist connected with metal—a gunshot sounded and then the ceiling was raining down on me. I kicked out as hard as I could and met a soft lump of skin. Fang dropped an elbow on the top of the sinking man's head; he went down like a ton of bricks.

The dust had finally settled and as I swept the room, I found that, miraculously, none of us had been shot yet. Nothing short of a miracle.

I could tell by the style of combat that these were EU men. I sank another and kicked his gun across the tile. There was a man huddled behind the register and he pulled it closer to him, eyes wide with fear.

I opened my mouth to tell him to protect himself, but another loud _bang_ sounded from my right and Fang was yelling _"No!"_ and suddenly my head was throbbing, ears ringing, world spinning, and I was on my knees on the tile.

I looked up, dazed; my hand found the side of my helmet and felt the massive dent that had been left there.

The bastard had shot me.

 _In the fucking head._

The magnitude of this was not lost on me despite the absolute pandemonium: they had shot _to kill_. I was no longer a prized possession they wanted to keep captive.

I was a target that they wanted to _murder._

The thoughts dissipated as quickly as they'd arrived. My focus snapped to my right where Fang was landing punch after powerful punch to the side of the head of the shooter. The instant the man fell to the floor, Fang snatched up the pistol and trained it on the center of the attacker's face, pressing one booted foot heavily into his windpipe.

Even from my position beside him on the floor, I could read the rage blazing in Fang's eyes. It was times like these when he was less human and more animal—his eyes were black and dilated.

But this wasn't him, and it would never be; Fang was a fierce protector, a loyal family member, and tough as nails, but he was not a murderer unless absolutely necessary.

" _Fang,_ " I choked out.

He turned and his face softened in an instant, and I knew the murderous thoughts had flushed from his mind. As I staggered to my feet, he removed the magazine from the gun in one swift movement. Fang tucked the useless weapon into the waistband of his pants and took a step backward, pressing his back against mine as he surveyed the room.

"Are you alright?" he breathed. I could hear the disbelief in his voice, probably because I'd been shot in the head and a hardhat I'd happened to find on the floor had _absorbed the freaking bullet_.

My voice cracked pathetically as I answered. "Peachy keen."

Angel, Gazzy and Iggy were nowhere to be seen. A few yards away, Nudge crashed down on top of the last soldier, kneeling over his midsection once they landed and firing blow after blow at his face with her white-knuckled fists. Blood pulsed from his face and coated the front of her new jacket.

His free hand reached to his waist to where I realized too late a gun was holstered, but Fang was moving instantly: like a seasoned pro, he pulled the gun he'd just unloaded from his waist and slammed the butt of it against the soldier's forehead. The man stilled immediately.

Nudge, bless her heart, spit directly in his face. "And stay down," she hissed.

Reality came crashing down on us. The clerk behind the counter peeked over the edge with the discarded gun in his hand, eyes as wide as sand dollars. A long gash cut down his face from the center of his forehead to just to the right of his nose, and the blood draining from it was staining his _Ollie's Subs & Deli _apron a brilliant shade of crimson.

"Call the police," Fang said in his no-nonsense voice. The clerk nodded and reached for the cordless phone on the counter. "And keep the gun until they clear the place."

"Where's Iggy?" I asked.

"Max!" A brown blur came flying at me and hit my chest with a sob. "Oh, my God, I thought you were _dead,_ when that gun went off, I swear to God—"

Fang wrapped an arm around my shoulder and pulled the hard hat from my head to inspect it. "I cannot believe this thing saved your life."

" _Hello?_ Where is Iggy?"

Fang grabbed both of us by the hand and started to walk toward the door. Nudge was hiccuping as she spoke. "He's okay—I saw Gazzy And Angel pull him out, he's okay."

Outside, a high-pitched whistle pierced the desert air. Nudge, Fang and I turned at the sound to find Gazzy stitching Iggy with one hand and waving frantically with the other at the edge of the parking lot.

To make matters impossibly worse: a crowd was growing around them.

"We have a situation," Fang mumbled.

The three of us hurried over to the group. Iggy was groggy but had no other visible injuries aside from the laceration at the side of his head. I knew he would be fine. Angel, however, looked nauseous; I could only imagine the thoughts she was getting off these people.

I looked at her and narrowed my eyes—I knew she didn't probe into the flock's thoughts anymore, but I willed her to listen to mine— _send them away. Send them away. Please, for the love of God, send them away._

Her head spun around to face me, and she nodded once. "We're okay here…" she said, waving her arms at the crowd.

"Nudge," I said out of the corner of my mouth. She was crying again. I reached out and squeezed her shoulder. " _Nudge._ Get it together. Focus. I need you to hotwire one of these cars."

" _What?"_ she yelped. I kicked her in the shin and she grimaced. "We should just up and away, we're already toast, the cops'll be here any minute—how am I gonna—I can't—"

"You can and you will. _Hotwire,_ " I hissed. " _Pronto."_

By some small miracle granted by a deity I was sure didn't exist, Angel was able to work her skills to ward off the massive crowd. Eyes glazed over, they began to dissipate one by one. Nudge picked out an older-looking minivan—one without a navigation system or any sort of on-board security—and set to work immediately.

"Give me a minute!" she squeaked from beneath the hood.

Gazzy stood protectively next to her, arms crossed over his chest. He looked impossibly taller than even two days ago.

Satisfied, I turned to Iggy, who was being interrogated by Fang.

"Where are we right now?"

Iggy groaned. "Man, don't make me—"

"You have a bleeding head injury," Fang snapped back. "Not time to be the hero. Answer the question."

"Death Valley," Iggy said snarkily. "My name is Iggy, I was raised in a dog crate, I like long walks on the beach and reality television, and I'll be damned if I don't enjoy a tall glass of rosé after a hard day at work."

This was good enough for me, but Fang still seemed unsatisfied, lips set in a tight line. He pulled off his pack and fished for a flashlight to shine in Iggy's eyes.

"Oh, also, I'm blind, you fucking moron."

"Who's the president?"

Iggy groaned again, much more loudly this time. "God, don't make me answer that."

Fang finally cracked a smile, and I saw a bit of the anxiety roll off his shoulders. Iggy reached out his fist and Fang bumped it.

"Got it!" Nudge shouted.

The crowd was still distracted by Angel's silent instruction—I filed this information away for later, deciding I needed to have a discussion with her about just how powerful her abilities had become in my absence—so we loaded one by one into the van, Fang in the driver's seat, me riding shotgun, and the rest of the flock in the back.

Fang popped the car into drive just as Iggy cocked his head from the far back. "Sirens," he muttered. "Punch it, Fang."

Once we'd made some decent progress down the road, the Gasman cracked open the first aid kit and began sanitizing his own wounds in the last row of seats, laughing as he did so. "How the hell do we keep slithering out of these situations?"

I whipped around in the passenger seat, full to the brim with frustration and ready to unload on anyone who pushed me. "This is _not funny."_

Iggy, who was still groggy but also still his usual, obnoxious self, cracked a dopey looking smile. "You have to admit, it's a _little_ funny."

"Like, we just kicked four grown men's assess at a sub shop, you got shot in the head, Ig got concussed by a piece of a pipe bomb, and the rest of us are full of shrapnel." Gazzy was belly laughing in a way that was typically infectious, but no part of me was entertained. "Then Nudge— _Nudge_ "—he gestured to her, as if to make a point— "hotwired a car _in broad daylight_ and we strolled our asses out of there before the cops arrived."

"I'd say we were lucky, but then…" said Iggy, trailing off with a vague gesture to his wings. He winced and drew a hand to his head, lightly palpating where Fang had bandaged him. "Goddamn, this hurts."

"Good thing your skull is so thick."

The two of them continued bantering in the back seat. Every so often, Angel cast a disapproving look over her shoulder. Meanwhile, Nudge's fingers were flying over the screen of the iPhone I had nabbed from the dead construction worker, eyebrows knitted in concentration.

"Hey," Fang said lowly from the driver's seat, reaching for my hand and grasping it tightly. It was warm and I couldn't remember the last time he'd held my hand in this way. I leaned into his touch. "You sure you're alright?"

I expected this question to soften me, as it often did; more times than not, this was the catalyst for a meltdown of some sort. The shootout at the sub shop had changed something, though. I didn't feel helpless or defeated.

No. I felt _pissed._

"I told you someone was watching us."

Fang sighed and squeezed my hand. "I don't know," he said gently. "I know we thought Charlie was a good guy, but now I'm not so sure we should go looking for him. At least not without a better plan."

"I don't give a shit what he is. We're finding Emily. And I'll kill her with my bare hands if I have to."

Fang turned to me at this, eyes flashing with concern and something else I wasn't sure of.

"Don't give me that," I said back. "You feel it too. I know you do. We _all_ do." I took a deep breath and lowered my voice, knowing I was asking for an argument with my next words. "And I might as well go alone. It's safer for everyone."

Fang groaned loudly.

"Oh, no you don't," said Iggy from the backseat, and I became acutely aware that we had an audience. "All or nothing, sister."

"Oh, Jesus, is she trying to be _noble_ again?" Gazzy said.

"Honestly, I don't know why she still tries to pull this crap."

"All for one, Max," Angel said. "Same way it's always been."

From the seat behind me, Nudge let out a quiet cheer, "Got it!" she said, sitting up straighter and brandishing the phone in the air. "BioLife. Somerset Street, just outside Las Vegas."

A tinny voice said, "Starting route to BioLife Headquarters, four-one-one Somerset Street, Las Vegas. Please proceed to the highlighted route."

She handed the phone to Fang, who slowed to a stop before turning the car around.

"Everyone ready?" Fang said.

Shouts of agreement came from the back seats. Fang offered me a brilliant smile; I couldn't help but smile back.

As we pulled onto the interstate, I copied the directions from the phone onto the back of a napkin from the glove compartment. We drove through a particularly desolate expanse of desert, and I rolled down the window and tossed the cellphone, watching as it smashed against the tar.

Nudge let out a high-pitched scream. I turned around, fists raised, ready to fight, before realizing that she was staring, teary-eyed, out the back window at where I'd thrown the phone.

"Jesus, Nudge," I breathed, holding a hand over my heart as it hammered away. "C'mon, you knew we couldn't hang onto that—we were a walking GPS."

"You weren't gonna win that Words With Friends game anyway," Gazzy added.

"I miss my phone," Nudge lamented, looking much like a child whose dog had just died. "And I'll have you know that I had the X _and_ the J, and there was that triple word score open—"

"It was my turn! I had the Z and I was ready to use it. They should have some sort of slaughter rule."

We drove for what felt like centuries, although in reality it was only a couple of hours. As we neared the Las Vegas Strip, we realized we had absolutely nothing for a plan, and the last thing I was going to do, as badly as I wanted to, was storm into this laboratory completely blind.

"Well, I certainly take offense," Iggy said when I voiced this concern to the flock.

"If we go somewhere with WiFi, I can get us more information," said Nudge. "It's only four o'clock, we could try to break in later tonight—"

"It's not that we want to break in, though," I said. "The note specifically wanted us to find someone named Emily. I don't think she'll be there after hours. And since it's already four…"

"Okay, so we book a room, then," said Iggy brightly, reaching back for his wallet. "You know me. Stacks on stacks and such."

"Why can't we just make everyone leave us alone by paying them off?" Angel groaned as Fang pulled off the highway.

Fang snorted. "Not enough money in the world."

"Yeah," Gazzy added, folding out a wing and gesturing to it. "Can't put a price tag on these, baby."

As the city lights of Las Vegas began to come into focus, I felt a ball of nausea begin to form at the base of my stomach. "Somewhere indiscrete, please."

* * *

"Absolutely not."

"Oh, _hell_ yes," said Gazzy.

" _Absolutely not!"_

"Is this Caesar's Palace?" Iggy asked, cocking his head to the side. "It'd better be Caesar's Palace."

"Honestly, _better_ ," Gazzy replied. His blue eyes were wide in the lights of the buildings around us. "The Venetian. Man, we are _upper class_."

"Is it bright? It sounds bright."

"Oh, _so_ bright."

"Oooh!" squealed Nudge, pointing a long finger at a woman with freshly styled hair. "Oh, where do you think she had it _done?_ "

I was one catcall away from an absolute meltdown. My skin was itching and I felt ready to up and away at any moment, as I typically did in massively populated, loud areas. Fang chuckled next to me, and I worked up the meanest expression I could before releasing the glower on him.

"Come on, Max," he said. "Relax. We can't stick out here. Plus, you know we've always been safest in crowds. Don't even try to tell me I'm wrong."

He was right, of course. It was the number one rule of escapism—disappear into a crowd. And as much as I hated to admit it, I was confident that I could fling all fourteen feet of my wings open here, in front of this hotel, in the middle of the hustle and bustle, and not a single person would bat an eyelash.

But I still didn't like it. And I wouldn't like it, no matter what.

"One night," I said to all of them through my teeth. "Do you hear me? One night. And we're not gambling, not running around—we're not here to play. We're here for the WiFi and the continental breakfast."

"And the pool," said Gazzy lowly.

Iggy coughed something that sounded suspiciously like " _andthestrippers._ " I balled up a fist and shot a powerful punch out at his shoulder, but he dodged at the last possible minute. "Kidding, kidding! _Jesus_."

* * *

"Human" – Rag'n'Bone Man

A/N: Twenty chapters! I started writing Fanfic when I was twelve, and I don't think I've ever written something this long. For those of you still reading/reviewing, thanks for sticking around!


	21. Twenty-One

A/N: Toward the end here, we get a bit of something I've never written before. Read on to find out.

I love my ghost readers, but I'm just curious as to how many people have stuck along for the ride—shoot me a review, even just a "still reading." It would be a lovely holiday gift :)

* * *

 _Wreckless heart, take over the wheel; we're headed for a fall  
Torn apart, it's how you feel; but it's all for love_

 _Gonna ride that river to the sea_  
 _Gonna cry that river out of me_

 _There's no cure for time separated, but I'm holding on_  
 _You can be sure the time heals the pain, what's done is done_

* * *

TWENTY-ONE

"God, I feel like I'm going to throw up," I said as we weaved through the massive crowd outside of the Venetian. I wasn't sure if it was the concussion, the anxiety, or both, but I was unwell all the same.

"I feel _alive,_ " Iggy said.

Next to me, Fang was far too casual about all of this. Growing up, he'd always been on the same page as me about these situations—uncomfortable in a group of people, jumpy at loud noises, and twitchy at bright lights—and though his jaw was a bit tight and his eyes were darting about the street as if searching for a threat, his shoulders were relaxed and he was smiling.

Out of the corner of my mouth, I said, "How on earth are you okay with this?"

Fang looked at me and smiled bigger. "Do you know how many of Nudge's All-State chorus concerts I had to go to before I stopped putting random strangers in headlocks? Or how many times someone called the cops on me at Angel's soccer games for dropping somebody who looked at me the wrong way?"

 _Soccer? All-State chorus?_

Before I could interrupt with questions, Fang was shrugging and shoving his hands in his pockets. "I swear, that's the only way Angel's abilities got as advanced as they are. She bailed me out at least once a week."

We walked into the Venetian to book a room—just like that, easy as freaking pie—and when the clerk at the desk said _credit cards only_ , Angel stepped forward and _encouraged_ her to let us pay in cash for one night. I watched Iggy hand over the hundred-dollar bills as if they were nothing; it gave me an odd feeling, remembering all the times we'd dumpster dived and hacked ATMs.

Iggy, blind as a bat but the most perceptive one out of us, wrapped an arm around my shoulder at the desk as the clerk processed our receipt. "Don't look so distraught, Max."

"How do you even—"

"I swear, it's like your emotions are _loud,_ " he said with a chuckle. _"_ We suffered enough, didn't we? Look at the cards we were dealt." He patted a hand against my wings, which were folded tightly against my back beneath my windbreaker. "All of us worked our asses off for years. We deserve this."

"And the free house from the government," added Gazzy.

"And the free house from the government," Iggy repeated. "Thanks, Obama."

"Oh," said the desk clerk in an oddly airy voice, cocking her head at her computer. "It appears we have the Chairman Suite available at a discounted rate tonight."

" _Really,_ " said Gazzy in a flawless impression of a British accent. "What _luck!"_

My head swiveled from the clerk's glassed-over eyes to Angel, who stood half-concealed behind Nudge. In the past, I might have narrowed my eyes at her, disappointed in her eagerness to take advantage of unknowing strangers, but now—especially after Iggy's short speech about hard work and deserving things—I offered a sly grin.

The clerk handed over three room keys and Iggy, Fang and I all pocketed one before leading the flock to the elevators.

I don't know what I thought might be in the Chairman Suite that set it apart from other rooms—perhaps a jacuzzi tub or a mini bar—but when the door slid open my jaw hit the floor and stayed there for the remainder of our walkthrough.

The living room alone was worth more than I was, wings and all: a massive flat screen television hung from the wall in the center of the room, surrounded by huge, plush furniture. To the right of the sofa was a massive baby grand piano that Iggy immediately made a beeline for.

He sat and started to play, and I stopped in my tracks.

"Excuse me?" I said, gesturing to where he was flawlessly playing a very complex song.

Nudge, Angel, and Gazzy had already scattered, ignoring my surprise and the fact that Iggy was suddenly a concert pianist.

" _Hello?_ " I said, turning to Fang with what must've been a look of complete shock on my face.

"Their school needed a volunteer pianist for the after-school vocal groups," Fang said with a smile. "Iggy and I went to pick Nudge up one day and they overheard him at the piano…"

"He's never taken a lesson in his life," I said. "How—?"

"How does Angel read minds? How does Nudge attract metal, hack all those computers, excel in technology? How do any of us have wings?"

"This is different, though," I said under my breath. "Fang, he's a freaking prodigy—"

"I can hear you two, you know," called Iggy from the piano.

"Let it go," Fang whispered at a volume both of us knew Iggy could hear, "his ego's inflated enough."

"Ha-ha," said Iggy over a complex bit of playing.

Fang picked up the backpack he'd brought with him from the cottage and grabbed me by the hand, tugging me toward the hallway.

"What is it with blind people and pianos?" I muttered.

We poked our heads into one of the rooms; it was vacant and had a king-sized bed. I could hear the girls in the bedroom next door, giggling about something as they unpacked.

Fang threw his pack on the floor and I flopped onto the mattress, letting out a moan as I sank into the memory foam.

"This is the most comfortable thing I've ever laid on."

"He gives you all the credit, you know," Fang said as he began to unload clothes and supplies from his backpack.

"Who, Iggy?" I asked. Fang nodded. "For what?" I asked incredulously.

He gestured vaguely toward the living room, where Iggy was now playing a more upbeat song I'd never heard before.

"How on earth is that _my_ doing?"

"You had Jeb buy him that Walkman and all those CDs after we broke out of the School."

I felt a blush creep to my cheeks. "I didn't know he told you that."

"He didn't," Fang said simply, pulling out a pair of sweatpants he'd evidently stolen from the cottage and throwing them my way. He produced another pair from the depths of the bag. "Didn't have to."

"For Christ's sake, are we allowed _any_ secrets in this family?"

Fang ignored me. "Whenever anyone asks how he learned, he always says, 'My older sister.' Nobody else knows you're tone-deaf and have never touched an instrument before in your life besides us, and nobody else shared a room with him besides me. I think he knew every note of that Beethoven one," he said, and then he laughed. "Actually, I think _I_ might know every note of that Beethoven one. He listened to it in bed every single night."

Just like that, I was eleven again, listening to Iggy humming the notes.

Iggy had finished the upbeat tune and had paused. Then, as if he'd heard our conversation—there was no way he had, not through the music and the walls of the hotel—he started the much slower melody to "Moonlight Sonata."

"That's the one," Fang said.

We changed into our sweatpants and returned to the living room, where Iggy had abandoned the piano and joined the rest of the flock around the TV. Our reappearance went largely unnoticed due to the room service menu open on the floor.

Nudge was cross legged in front of the coffee table with the laptop open in front of her. Her fingers were a blur.

"Okay," she said, clicking a final time before turning the screen toward us. "Here's the blueprint, the duct system looks pretty complex—it looks like this building was designed as a factory, so its infrastructure is pretty heavy-duty, so we should have an easy way out if things go south—"

Gazzy was wide-eyed. "How the hell did you find this?"

"She's Nudge," Angel said, leaning forward to scrutinize the image. "When has she ever _not_ found something?"

"You guys act like it's magic or something. Every building has an architect, every architect has some sort of online base for their drafts—"

"And you can access literally anything that's online."

Nudge blushed and pulled the computer back into her lap. "Well, when you put it like that…"

"Okay," said Iggy, "so we show up when they open in the morning, we ask for Emily—"

"It can't be all of us." My words were met with frustrated groans and "not again"s, as I knew they would, but I plunged on. "No, listen—it can't. First of all, some of these people—probably _most_ of these people—are ex-School employees, possibly people from EU."

"I don't know if this is what you think it is, Max," Nudge said from behind the laptop screen.

"Yeah, this place looks pretty clean," Gazzy offered, having abandoned the menu in favor of reading over Nudge's shoulder. "'BioLife is a CLIA-certified laboratory dedicated to understanding the deepest parts of the human genome,' blah blah blah, science, science, microbiology…"

"CLIA?"

"Some FDA certification," Nudge said, fingers flying over the keys again. "Basically means that this place is legit."

I snorted. "Yeah, okay. I'm not buying it. The School got away with what they did for _years._ Same with Itex, same with EU. Don't think it'd be that hard for this place to do it, too."

"The School and all those places were underground, though," Iggy pointed out.

"No, they weren't."

"Not literally, Gazzy," said Fang. "He means unregistered, unknown. It's not like they had a website or anything. Definitely not an address that would ping on Google Maps."

"Itex wasn't unknown, remember? Their label was on everything."

"Still, they weren't advertising that they specialized in genetics or recombinant lifeforms or anything. Nobody knew the School or EU existed until they blew up."

"Literally."

My head was starting to hurt again. All of this was irrelevant information to me—there was no way the six of us were going to walk into this laboratory together, like, _hi, it's the six mutants you've been trying to re-imprison for ten years, how the heck are ya?_

"This isn't a discussion. We are not all going in there. We're recognizable enough on our own, let alone in a group. We already don't know what we're dealing with here. We have no clue how Emily ties into this, or who the guy who even wrote the note on the receipt is. All we know is they knew we'd go to Death Valley, and then with everything that happened at lunch today—"

"So, what?" Iggy said, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning back. "Is this going to be the classic Max-and-Fang-save-the-day-while-the-incompetent-children-wait-uselessly-behind? Because I'm pretty sick of that one, to be totally honest with you."

"Iggy," Fang said in warning.

"This isn't about that, and you know it's not," I snapped back. "Come on, the six of us together are way more recognizable than just one or two of us. And it's me they want, so if shit's gonna hit the fan, I'd rather them just be able to take me."

Iggy threw his hands into the air. "For the love of fucking God…"

"You don't get to do this. It's not you're decision. We're going," Nudge said firmly, and Gazzy and Angel nodded alongside her. Fang said nothing, showed nothing, but I knew he was on their side.

I was outnumbered. It was a strange feeling.

I didn't like it.

I sighed and sat on the floor next to them, rubbing a hand to my aching forehead. "Okay, _fine,_ " I said, although it was very unfine. "So you guys hide in the duct work and I'll just walk in."

"No chance, Max."

"They'll recognize you in a second."

" _Okay_ ," I said, giving Iggy and Fang an annoyed glare, "then I'll have Angel come with me, if they recognize me she can just—"

"That won't work," Angel said with a frown. "If they recognize you, I can't alter that—recognition is one of the strongest parts of memory, it's why we have the déjà vu phenomenon. I'll be useless to change that."

A look of surprise must've washed over my face, because Gazzy chuckled.

"Angel did a lot of self-educating on neurology and the inner machinations of the mind over the past few years," he said. "Resident genius, over here."

"If anybody's going in the vents, it's you," Fang said, glancing at me. "If there's even a chance any EU employees are there, they'll know who you are right away. Same with old Whitecoats."

"And before you try to go behind our backs and sneak off in the name of self-sacrifice for the greater good, if they recognize you and come after you, then the whole plan is blown to pieces, and they'll come after the rest of us and take us anyway," Iggy pointed out.

My stomach dropped. He was right. And I was out of ideas.

"Fang, you stand out like a sore thumb _anywhere_ you go," said Angel. "Iggy, you too. So the three of you are out. It should be me; I can try to confuse them if—"

"Angel, it was you they came after all those years ago in Colorado," I said. "And didn't we just establish that if they know it's us, we're screwed anyway because there's nothing you can do?"

"I probably look the most different out of all of us," said Gazzy, which was a gross understatement—he'd grown over a foot and filled out despite his gangly limbs. But he'd been captured with Fang and I, and when I reminded him of such he seemed disappointed that he couldn't play the hero.

It left only one of us, and I was entirely unhappy about it, although I would've been unhappy no matter what way it shook out.

"Me," said Nudge with a fearless, determined nod.

"Nudge," I said quietly, but I stopped myself before I continued. I'd tried to baby her since I'd gotten back, but I knew she was a young woman now, beautiful and intelligent and strong, just as I always knew she'd be.

I still didn't have to like it.

"I can handle this, Max," she said softly, reaching for my hand. "I know I'm still one of the kids to you, but I promise—I can handle this."

Her eyes flitted to Fang and the two of them shared some sort of significant look before he nodded and offered a proud, approving half-smile.

Nudge cracked her knuckles and bent back over the keyboard. "Let's get to work."

It didn't take long to formulate a plan, considering all we needed to really do was sneak into the duct system (this would require some trick work by Angel), let Nudge enter the building, meet with this woman to decide whether or not she was an enemy, and know our escape routes in case things got crazy.

Within the hour, I was huddled under the Egyptian cotton sheets of one of the king-sized beds. I had been under the impression Fang was going to crash with me—there was more than enough room for the two of us to sprawl out separately, and after he'd stayed with me that first night back in Massachusetts, it would've been nothing—but when he hadn't come in I'd assumed he was either up on his laptop or snoozing on one of the massive pull-out couches in the living space.

I had been tossing and turning for the better part of four hours when there was a knock at the door and I rifled into a seated position, ready to attack.

"Just me," came Fang's voice, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw him flash a half-smile. "Can't sleep either?"

"How is this possible?" I moaned, throwing the covers off and sitting at the edge of the bed. "I'm absolutely exhausted."

Fang leaned against the edge of the doorframe. "Pretty par for the course that everyone else is asleep except you and me."

"Old habits die hard," I grumbled.

"Wanna go for a fly?"

I angled my head up to meet his gaze and popped an eyebrow after casting a quick glance to the clock. _"Now?"_

Fang let loose a quiet laugh. "What was that you were saying about old habits?"

* * *

A short fly later, we were back at our old perch. I drew my legs to my chest and hugged them there, resting my chin on my knees as I watched the hawks circling in the early sunrise over the canyon. They were just as graceful as I remembered them.

Watching Fang fly over the past few days had made me realized he'd only built upon the skills that we'd picked up from them all those years ago. The rest of the flock seemed to as well. I looked like an overweight pigeon compared to them in the air.

Fang reappeared from inside the cave where he'd stowed his bag, cracking open a can of Mountain Dew and handing it to me as he settled at the edge next to me. He brought his own can of soda to his lips, a Cherry Coke.

"You remembered," I said, gesturing to the Mountain Dew. I took a long sip and almost choked—I'd forgotten how painful carbonated beverages could be—but continued to drink it anyway.

"What do you mean, 'you remembered?'" Fang said incredulously, though a smile crept to his face. "I remember everything."

"Not going to fight you on that one. If it happened, you remember it."

"You could've been gone for thirty years, and I'd still remember everything about you."

I felt a blush creep to my cheeks at those words. "Lucky you," I said weakly.

He was staring straight at me; I met his eyes and blushed more, so I looked away, but I could see in my peripheral vision that he was leaning closer, eyes blazing with a heat that I barely recognized.

"The only thing I couldn't remember, no matter how hard I tried," he said huskily, face inches from mine, now, "was the way you smelled."

A shiver of electricity shot through me, like lightning.

"Iggy washed all the sheets after that first week, but he didn't know I'd taken one of the pillowcases."

This was a development. I turned to face him to find a painfully vulnerable expression; there were years of pain and longing and _something else_ in his eyes, his lips, his furrowed eyebrows.

"There were a few days, at the beginning, after we'd searched high and low for you, where I couldn't pull myself away from that fucking pillowcase," he said quietly. "Angel and Gazzy thought I was doing research. Iggy was beside himself as it was. Nudge was the only one who knew how fucked up I was. She took care of Angel and Gazzy—and Iggy and I—for a week. Then she found the pillowcase."

He was quiet a moment while he two of us watched the hawks swoop deep into the canyon. One of them, the largest one, returned to the air with something dangling from its beak. A desert rat, I guessed.

"I thought she would cry. Or try to keep it for herself," Fang said, wringing his hands together over his knees. The sunrise was a violent, blood red, making his eyes look black in its light. "But she didn't. She put it in the wash."

The look he'd shared with Nudge earlier suddenly made sense; if anyone knew how strong-minded and capable she was, it was Fang.

When he turned to face me, I said nothing, instead mapping his face with my eyes, committing it to memory, knowing that if I was ever taken from him again that I would never forget the way he was looking at me in this moment.

"I exploded—I saw red, I couldn't breathe. I lost my mind. I—I don't remember much," he admitted. "She and Iggy pinned me to my bed, and I had this moment of clarity where it all hit me, and then I lost it."

He paused and kept staring at the horizon. I almost thought he was done, until finally: "I cried until I couldn't see anymore."

I inhaled deeply and tried to force back the tears that were pricking in my eyes. I knew that feeling of hopelessness, of loss; I had lived it in high definition for so many impossibly long years. But it was something I'd never seen in Fang, and the thought of him suffering so much because of me, thinking I was dead—it was too much for me to process.

"You were gone," he whispered into the dawn. "And there was nothing I could do, no one I could kill, not a sliver of evidence to find."

"Fang…" I started, but there was no way I could finish—what could I possibly say?

His eyes met mine again and he looked at me in a way he never, ever had before, and said, in almost a whisper, "I love you, Max. I've loved you for as long as I've known what love is."

It wasn't cheesy or scripted or overboard—it was matter-of-fact, scientific, calculated: as if he were reminding me the sky was blue.

He shifted his gaze from me back to the hawks. Every part of his body language was open, free. Something about this—and maybe, too, about the way the muscles of his arms stood out against his tee shirt, and the how the line of his jaw was highlighted in the rising sun _, and how he'd just admitted to loving me_ —flicked a switch in me.

I leaned forward and cupped my hand around his chin. As I angled his face toward me, I tried to tell him everything I'd ever felt about him in the single act of crushing his lips against mine.

This was the third time we'd ever kissed, the second in the last five years, but it was very different from the tame peck we'd shared at the lakeshore weeks ago. No, there was a _fire_ inside of me, one id never felt before, in _places_ id never felt before, and in moments my entire body was covering Fang's, pressing his back into the dusty, sandy surface of the cliff face.

We were inches from the edge but just as I began to consider this fact, Fang's tongue forced my lips apart and my body was a live wire, writhing and pulsing on top of him. He rolled us away from the cliff face so he was on top of me, not breaking away for a moment as he did.

He pulled his lips from mine and trailed his mouth across my cheek, down my jaw, to my neck—then he was biting, licking, kissing the skin there, and I was making sounds I'd never made before and grabbing fistfuls of his shirt in my shaking hands.

" _Fang,"_ I breathed.

He froze immediately, pulling himself from my neck and meeting my gaze. Everything about him, usually so hard and impenetrable and stoic _,_ was _soft_ and pliable, and he cradled me in his gaze like something fragile.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"God, _yes,_ " I said in a guttural moan.

"Are you absolutely positive?"

In lieu of answering, I grabbed him by the back of his head and slammed his lips to mine.

We were attached at the mouth but somehow, without stopping, he pulled us to standing and carried me backward into the cave. My legs wrapped around his waist and something deep inside me was roaring, throbbing, begging for something more as I felt parts of him I'd never felt before hot and solid against my jeans.

Fang was panting as he moved his mouth back to my neck and I was moaning and throwing my head back in an embarrassingly unhinged way but I _couldn't stop_ —and when his hand found my bra over my shirt I let out a sound that could only be classified as a scream of pleasure.

I waited for Fang to stop, but when he didn't, the monster inside me only grew more powerful.

My hands trailed down to the back pockets of his jeans; I squeezed, and he let out a groan into my collarbone. Blindly, I moved my hands around the front of his jeans and repeated my movement.

Fang's knees buckled, and we almost went down. He caught himself at the last moment.

"Jesus fucking Christ." His voice was husky and deep and nearly a growl. "Can't do that."

He lowered me to my feet and I wrapped one leg around him, desperate to be as close as possible, the centimeters between us forced by our clothing feeling like miles that kept us apart. One of his hands found the back of my jeans and pulled me closer to him, a low, pleasured sound rolling from somewhere deep in him. Then he was grabbing at my hips, my shoulders, my jaw, and his mouth was _everywhere,_ so much so that I could barely return the favor—I decided shoving my hands into the front of his pants would suffice, head thrown back as his mouth assaulted my neck, unsure of how long we'd be able to remain vertical before one of us collapsed with pleasure.

We were frenzied. It was the only way to describe it. I didn't know if it was the 2% animal or the 98% human part of us, but whatever it was, it had taken over, turning us into passionate, disinhibited maniacs.

I wasn't complaining.

Then we were moving again, his mouth to my collarbone, his tongue sliding along my skin and igniting every single nerve ending of my body.

Suddenly, we were slamming into the wall of the cave—I felt the bite of the rock against my lower back, where my shirt had ridden up, and Fang's body was completely pressed against mine, leaving no room for imagination or _is that your gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me_ s, his mouth found my neck again and we were moving together, and I realized I'd never imagined it was possibly to feel this way, feel this _good_ —

—and just like that another feeling came to me, a familiar one that started deep in the pit of my stomach and rose up like wildfire, contagious and unstoppable and destructive, and with it came the voices—

" _Maximum Ride."_

It was his voice, thick and gross, and it was cigarettes and pain and seaweed-green eyes—

" _I've been so patient."_

And that cement room with the sliding metal door, and broken bones and bound wings and I was starving, I was broken, I was dying—

" _You are mine."_

And my own voice was coming out of me in a panic, and I couldn't breathe, couldn't see—colors speckled my vision and the world was spinning, but I was pinned, I couldn't move—"No, no, no, _please_ , no—"

The force pressing me to the cave wall was gone, and I dropped the few feet to the ground on my ass, scrambling as quickly as I could to the rocky corner. I was breathing impossibly fast and could feel my heart pounding in my chest; at this rate, it would surely explode and cover the walls of this cave with whatever was left of me.

Reality came slamming back. _Cave. Hawks._ The barely rising sun on the horizon. The drying saliva on my neck and shoulders.

The man on all fours, shoulders trembling, four feet from me.

"Oh, God, Fang—no, no."

I crawled across the ground toward him, ignoring the burn of the pebbles against my knees and palms. Fang didn't look up, but I put a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry," I mumbled, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry—"

A choked sort of laugh came out of him and he shook his head. When he raised his gaze to meet mine, his eyelashes were wet, and his eyes were blazing.

" _You're_ sorry?"

"I liked it," I blurted, "I loved it—I wanted to keep going, I swear."

Any other time, I'd be horrified at the words and how quickly they came out of my mouth, but now I wanted nothing more than to reassure Fang that he'd done nothing wrong, that I could separate him from Mallory and all the other bad things in my past, that I would be okay.

I still wasn't entirely convinced all of that was true, but I could do my damndest to convince him.

"I'm sorry," I repeated sincerely.

"Max. I wasn't thinking, I shouldn't have… not all at once, or so soon. I should've known better than to push you, I got selfish and then I couldn't stop."

His face plainly displayed anger. I knew he was furious with himself and I wanted nothing more than to make him feel better.

"But I—I want to," I said quietly, ducking my head in embarrassment. "I wanted all of that. More, even. I just… I'm fucked up. Maybe forever. My brain just can't differentiate…"

 _You from the sociopath who raped and imprisoned me for four years._

Nice, Max. Really nice.

Fang's hand cupped my chin and forced me to look at him. His eyes held more emotions than I could separate out, but I saw his apology and more fondness than I knew what to make of.

"I'm sorry," I said again, because I was. Painfully so. Tears pricked to the corner of my eyes and I blinked and let them fall, wondering if I'd ever be anything more than what those years had turned me into.

Fang used his thumbs to wipe the tears. "Still a few hours until we have to be back," he said softly. "Lay with me?"

We settled on the ground a few feet from the cliff face; I laid on my side next to him and he pulled me into him, leaving his arm wrapped around my shoulder. I rested my head on his chest and inhaled deeply, feeling that _cedar and cotton and home_ fill me, sending the anxiety somewhere far, far away.

* * *

"Wreckless Heart" – Glen Hansard


	22. Twenty-Two

_You've got no place to hide  
And I'm feeling like a villain, got a hunger inside  
One look in my eyes,  
And you're running cause I'm coming, going to eat you alive_

* * *

TWENTY-TWO

"Nice of you to join us," was Iggy's smug greeting when Fang and I returned later that morning.

I narrowed my eyes, grabbing Fang's wrist to check the time. "It's not even eight yet," I snapped. "Back off."

Iggy made _tsk_ ing noises with his tongue. "And where were we so late past curfew, might I ask?"

"Lake Mead," Fang said quickly, cutting me off before I could suggest a different location somewhere deep within Iggy's more intimate anatomy. "Been a while. Wanted to check out the hawks."

"Yeah, I bet that's what you were checking out—"

"Love birds back?" Gazzy called from the kitchen with a _clang_ that I assumed must've been a frying pan. "There's bacon in this fridge, you know; do you think it's complimentary?" A pause, and then: "You know what, fuck it. Who cares. Frying it up anyway. _Yolo."_

There were so many different layers to what he'd said that I decided against responding altogether.

"Where are the girls?"

"Ran to a store," Iggy said, smug look still on his face from teasing Fang and I. "Nudge said something about 'looking the part.' Angel, naturally, was all over it. They left us to fend for ourselves."

" _Women,_ " Gazzy called, exasperated, from the kitchen.

Fang and I took to packing up our belongings from the bedroom. I had just pulled on a fresh pair of jeans and a long-sleeve tee shirt and was jamming my old clothes into Fang's bag when he swooped down and wordlessly placed a kiss on my cheek.

"Quit feeling bad about earlier," he said lowly. "After all of this is over, we have the rest of our lives to take our time."

I felt myself turn bright red, but before I could say anything, Fang had already left the room.

Any normal girl would be ecstatic: he was _the_ dream guy. Tall, dark, handsome, and with a pair of wings to boot. I'd blue-balled him and cried yet he had still let me doze off against his chest in the rising sun.

Why did I feel so awful about it?

Awful, I guess, wasn't the correct word—I felt anything but _awful_ —it was more that I felt a painful sort of guilt that resonated deep in my bones. He had been so, so careful with me, had asked me more than once if I was okay, and I'd totally lost it.

 _And he still just kissed you on the cheek and said you guys had forever,_ said some tiny part of my conscience.

I sighed and pulled the backpack onto one shoulder. We weren't nearly out of the woods with this EU situation and being distracted by thoughts like these would get me—or all of us—killed.

When I entered the living room, I found Fang, Iggy and the Gasman crowded around the coffee table with a skillet of eggs and bacon between them. "Hey!" I protested. "Did you think maybe _I_ was hungry?"

Iggy grinned before I could even finish, holding up a second skillet with a hearty portion of food on it.

"And there's more for Nudge and Angel," Gazzy said around a mouthful of eggs.

"As if we weren't going to give you the biggest portion," Iggy said. "You're still a skeleton."

From outside the door, there was a bit of movement and then the sound of somebody running a keycard through the slot. "Just us," Angel called from behind the door. "Wait till you see Nudge!"

The door opened and Angel bounded in. "Ta-da!"

Nudge stepped into view, donned in a tight pair of black chinos and a smart gold blouse. She wore short, gold heels on her feet and had styled her hair in a curly bun at the top of her head. Somehow—I didn't ask—she looked like she'd had her makeup professionally done. A blazer hung over one elbow, probably to throw on over the blouse to hide the bulge of her wings. A huge handbag was slung over the opposite shoulder.

She looked, quite literally and with no exaggeration, like a supermodel.

Next to me, there was a shatter.

The Gasman's mouth was dangling open comically wide, and the glass of orange juice he'd been holding was spattered all over the dark tile of the floor. Despite our staring, he was either unable or unwilling to fix his embarrassingly obvious awestruck expression.

Iggy, perceptive as usual, looked confused. "What?" he asked. "Is everything alright?"

Gazzy awkwardly cleared his throat, but when he spoke, his voice crackled hilariously anyway. "Uh, yeah…"

"Nudge, you look _beautiful_ ," I said, stepping forward to fix one of the sleeves of her blouse. She beamed at me with those fudge-sundae eyes. "Talk about dressing the part. I'd let you do my taxes any day."

"Oh, _no,_ " she lamented, screwing up her beautiful face. "I wasn't going for accountant—is it too accountant-y? Angel, you said it wasn't—"

"Absolutely not," Angel said urgently, tossing me a death glare, "you look business-chic, Department of Health, _may I speak to your manager_. _Definitely_ not CPA."

" _Definitely_ not," Gazzy said in a hoarse voice.

"Are we dressed _appropriately_?" Iggy said tensely, furrowing his eyebrows as he rose to his feet. It was hilarious to see him so protective and dadlike. "Because you're still my little sister, you know, and I won't have you leaving this house—"

"Well, it's a hotel, so—" Angel deadpanned.

"—dressed anything short of conservative, do you hear me?"

"Definitely wouldn't say conservative," Fang muttered from next to him, arms crossed, and I could sense the protectiveness in _his_ tone, too.

Suddenly, I was annoyed—who were they to tell Nudge she couldn't dress nicely and flaunt her beauty? "Oh, for Christ's sake, she's wearing _pants_ and a _blazer!_ " I snapped. "And she's not heading to the club—she's trying to get us into this lab!"

"You could easily pass for twenty-five," Angel said.

And it was true. With her made-up, high-cheekboned face, all-business bun, and killer outfit, she'd aged ten years before our eyes. A blush crept to her cheeks, making her look impossibly prettier.

"Max, are you _crying?_ "

I hadn't even noticed. I drew a hand to my eyes and let out a half-laugh when I realized they were, in fact, wet. "I'm a wreck, huh?" I said. "God, sometimes I just think about what our lives would've been like if we were normal… Nudge, I think you actually would've been a model. You are just…" _Stunning_.

"Alright, alright, that's enough, I'm going to be sick," said Iggy. "And _you_ ," he said to the Gasman, having apparently picked up on how flustered the youngest boy in the flock had gotten, "pull it the hell together, will you? Jesus."

Gazzy flushed a painful shade of red and retreated to the kitchen. Iggy turned back to the couch, feeling around for the laptop before cracking it open and turning it on. "Let's go over all of this one more time before we go."

Nudge peeled off her heels, rubbing the bottoms of her feet as she did so. "Yuck," she said. "I hope this is fast."

From the kitchen, there was a snort from the Gasman. " _Women,"_ he repeated.

* * *

"Okay," I whispered from the passenger's seat of today's new and improved hotwired minivan, which Nudge had hilariously done in her fancy outfit, "so Nudge, you have the earpiece—"

"All of that's figured out," she said, tapping a hand against the Bluetooth piece in her ear. We'd run a Bluetooth microphone beneath her blouse, both of which were connected to one of the two burner phones we'd purchased. The other was in my trembling hands.

"We just need to figure out how to get _you_ guysinto the vent system."

"Lovely," said Iggy. "Sounds like a fantastic thing to have not considered until this exact second—"

"Oh, quit acting like it's the end of the world," Angel muttered. "I just make them all look away, and—"

"And if they recognize you?"

"They can't, if I push the energy from here," she said irritably.

"You can _do_ that?"

"I'll clear out the waiting room, we'll up-and-in, and that'll be the end of it. We already know the ductwork is huge, so we should all fit easily."

"Okay," I said, nodding and trying to re-access my leader side. "So Nudge, wait here, Angel, you clear out the waiting room, then we move. Nudge, when we're in place—"

Nudge tapped her earpiece, smiling. "Got it. Relax, Max. This is small potatoes compared to what we're used to."

She was right—I knew she was right—but it did nothing to soothe me.

We filed out of the van, pausing a moment while Angel concentrated heavily on the front door. After a moment, she gave us a nod, and one by one, we entered the waiting room.

It was vacant.

"We could just try to find her," Gazzy said in a whisper. "You know, go room by room—"

Iggy snorted. "And do what, scream, 'Emily, it's us, the mutants in search of you, we come in peace, please be a good guy—'"

" _Shut up,"_ I hissed. "We're sticking with the plan, idiots. Look for the vent."

"Found it," said Fang, pointing a finger upward. Sure enough, there was a large grate in the industrial-style ceiling.

"Yikes," I said, trying to imagine fitting even one wing through it. "Any ideas?"

"I'll go first," said Angel. I opened my mouth to protest, but she interrupted me. "I'm the smallest. If I get a good amount of momentum, I can fold my wings in and grab onto the edge. Then I'll help pull you guys up."

Angel pulled off her sweatshirt, stretching her alabaster wingspan through the slits in her long sleeve shirt. She took a deep breath and hovered, trying to pull the vent off the ceiling.

"Anybody have a screwdriver?" she said with a weak laugh.

Fang pulled off his own sweatshirt and shoved open his wings to hover next to her. When he reached his arms up to tug on the vent, the muscles of his biceps flexed, and I remembered just hours ago when those same strong arms had touched me, held me, and his mouth had—

"Okay, so we have two options: we either find a Phillips head, or I pull this off and we pray nobody notices."

"Just yank it, Fang," Iggy said, blissfully unaware of how red every inch of my skin had become. "I've got some tape in my bag, we can try to throw it back together somehow."

With one, strong tug, the vent was free, bits of paint and drywall falling on us like snowflakes as Fang dropped to the floor. Angel touched down on the carpet and then jumped as high as she could, flinging her wings out and giving one powerful flap before pulling them in and reverse canon-balling into the hole in the ceiling.

"Well, it's definitely big enough up here. Who's next?"

One by one, we copied Angel, squeezing our bodies into the duct system as best we could. Fang was last, and he and Iggy managed some sort of magic with several pieces of duct tape to jerry-rig the vent back into place.

"Okay," I said into the flip phone, trying not to hyperventilate due to how small of a space I was stuck in. "We're in. Remember, all we need to do is figure out where Emily is."

"Got it," Nudge said, voice determined. Beneath us, the door clanged open. "Angel, send the receptionist back in."

I heard the clacking of Nudge's heels, and then her professional voice was drifting through the vent, and boy did she _turn on the charm._ "Hello! How _are_ you? Yes, I'm Cleopatra from the Department of Public Health. Please, call me Cleo." She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Don't worry, don't worry—no official business—just here to check in with an employee I have some follow-up scheduled with. Hang on, I know my badge is in here somewhere…"

She made a loud show of shoving through her handbag, which we'd filled with every single complimentary item the hotel had given us, along with several sheets of plain printer paper for effect.

"Oh," said the receptionist, sounding surprised and a little bit skeptical. "Are you sure you've got the right place? I'm certain I've never seen you before—usually we follow up with the same representatives—"

"You must be thinking of Linda?" More rifling through the handbag. "Short, curly hair—looks like she might've forgotten to brush it—"

 _Too specific._

"No, I don't think so—"

"Marjorie, then. Beautiful eyes and walks with a purpose?"

 _Just vague enough._

There was a pause, and sure enough: "I—I guess, that might've been her."

"Traveling," sighed Nudge. "Europe. Berlin, actually, right now, I think. Can you believe it? I swear, I regret ever friending her—I just _have_ to show you the pictures, truly, you'll never want to see her again—God, where is my _phone?_ I can't find anything in this thing, sometimes I swear it's a black hole—"

"Ah, no, that's alright. If I had the time. Paperwork, you know." A polite laugh. Her voice was much more relaxed when she spoke. "This receptionist gig is harder than it looks."

"Oh, honey, don't I _know_ it," cooed Nudge. "And that's why I'm here—got a couple of things to sweep under the rug for you, _pro bono_. Maybe clear up some of that paperwork before the holidays, what do you say?"

Another laugh from the receptionist, but this one was much friendlier. Gazzy gave a little victory fist-pump—Nudge had done it: we were for sure in at this point.

Below us, the two of them started bantering.

"Hurry it up, Nudge," I said under my breath into the phone.

Iggy let out a sudden, stifled laugh from next to me.

When I turned, he was dragging a hand down his face. "Oh, man," he whispered, "watch out, corporate America. Monique-Tiffany-Krystal-Cleopatra is coming for you, and she's going to swindle you _all_ with that charisma."

Across from me, Fang grinned.

Gazzy had a hand over his mouth trying to stifle laughter. "She's absolutely _killing_ it down there," he said through his fingers. "How on earth—"

"Shh, _shh—_ "

"—Emily?" the receptionist was saying, her voice significantly kinder than when Nudge had first walked in. "Of course. Which one, Emily Cousteau or Emily Rogers? Unless you need Emily Wilson from housekeeping."

There was a beat. Of course. There had to be about a million Emilys in the world, no doubt there would be three that worked at this office. How the hell would we possibly know?

But Nudge was _good_. "Gosh, I'm quite the scatterbrain this morning," Nudge said smoothly, and I heard her fumbling with her handbag again. "Let me get my paperwork—I want to say Rogers, but now, the more I think about it—"

"Sweetheart, it's Monday, I'd be more concerned if you _knew_ what was going on," said the receptionist, and Nudge let out a contagious giggle. "You've got a lot of papers there, don't bother—I'm sure we can figure it out. What department?"

None of us moved, none of us breathed. It certainly didn't seem like this lady was on to us, but if Nudge was supposed to be from the Department of Public Health and didn't even know who she was here to _see_ …

"Genetics, I think," Nudge said finally.

It was a total stab in the dark, but by some miracle, it _worked._

"Got to be Emily Cousteau," said the receptionist, but it sounded like she was frowning. "I'm not sure why you'd have follow-up with her, though—she started _just_ recently, was a transfer from an outside lab—"

My heartrate skyrocketed.

"That'd be her," Nudge said brightly. I could hear the nervousness in her voice, but only because I knew her so well. "Just some transfer clarifications, and a bit of an incident to clear up. No biggie. Can't say much more than that, unfortunately." She dropped her voice to a quieter pitch. "Like I said—between you and me—tidy some things up for everyone." There was no doubt in my mind that she winked.

The receptionist laughed again. "Never met someone from the DPH with a conscience."

"We're few and far between, honey."

"Dr. Cousteau's office is down the hall, last one on the right. Just head on in. And don't worry if you aren't familiar with sign—she's got plenty of assistive devices in there."

That one got me. I turned to Fang, whose face was just as clueless as mine. _What?_

Nudge's million-watt smile was audible when she spoke. "Thanks so much… Cassie," she said, as if reading a name tag. "You've been so helpful."

I motioned for Angel to start crawling in the direction of the lab, and she did so, following the sound of Nudge's clacking heels through the hallway below us.

"How the _hell_ did you pull that off so well?"

"I had no idea what the frick I was saying for literally ninety-nine percent of that," she breathed. "What are they talking about, 'assistive devices?'"

"Don't know," I muttered back. "Are you at the door?"

"Almost. If there's a left up there, take it; that should put you right above the lab."

We arrived at a new vent; I peered down could see beakers and microscopes and a long table, but nothing else.

"There's somebody down there," Iggy said, cocking his ear toward the vent. "Just one. A woman. Small. Sounds like she's in a chair at a computer, or something."

"Doesn't sound like much of a threat," Gazzy said.

Angel snorted. "Don't underestimate a woman because of her size."

"Are you ready, Nudge?" I asked. "Head in on three." I nodded to Fang, who had a hand on the grate, ready to push it down and out so we could drop into the room.

"One, two, _three!_ "

Fang drove his fist at the grate, knocking it from its spot in the drywall, and then dropped like a stone behind it. I followed suit, the rest of the flock clambering behind me.

The woman at the desk spun around and I had to do a double-take. The blonde, curly hair; the scared, periwinkle eyes; the small, huddled frame.

It was the nurse from EU.

Allie's mother.

Charlie's—something.

" _You're_ Emily?" I whispered.

"No fucking way," said Gazzy.

"What?" Iggy said, annoyed.

"What are you _doing_ here?"

Iggy's ears were turning red with frustration. " _Hello?_ A little help here? _"_

"It's the nurse from EU."

" _What?"_ Iggy repeated. "No fucking—"

"What are you _doing_ here?" I asked her, reaching a hand out to brush her shoulder. Although I'd hated every minute I'd spent in that hellhole, she was a friendly face. I'd known from the beginning of my time there that she'd somehow been forced into her work there, imprisoned; her eyes were too kind, her spirit too haunted to be a Whitecoat by choice. "You're a _doctor?_ "

She nodded, and then shook her head after a moment of consideration. Her hands made a few fluid gestures and Fang sucked in a small-breath of understanding. "PhD?" he said, and she smiled, nodding. "Sign," he said in understanding as Emily turned to her desk. "She's deaf."

"You know _sign language?_ " Gazzy said incredulously to Fang. "Are you kidding me?"

I shook my head, just as Emily looked back at us and did the same. "Not deaf," I corrected. "Mute." I pointed to the long scar on her throat, the one that was always concealed by turtleneck undershirts at EU. "All of the employees that weren't soldiers were forced into cordectomies."

Emily returned to our circle with a pen and a legal pad. She began to scribble furiously.

 _Charlie,_ she wrote.

Allie's father, who'd died back at EU. Maybe she was wondering if we'd found him.

"No," I said quietly, shaking my head. "I'm sorry."

She shook her head and turned to one of the cabinets that lined the wall. She pulled it open, revealing a deep shelf that had a blanket on it… with a living, breathing form underneath it.

She reached out an arm and shook the figure—Fang stepped in front of all of us, arms open protectively—

A familiar mop of hair poked out. When his eyes settled on me, I had to force myself to breathe.

"Holy shit," said Charlie, looking rough around the edges but, at the same time, very much _not dead_. "Emily. I can't believe it fucking worked."

" _Charlie?"_

Things were getting weirder by the second, and I had to find something concrete before I absolutely lost my mind.

I advanced on Charlie, grabbing him by the collar and shoving him into the back of the cabinet. He could overpower me easily, I knew, but it was a good sign that he didn't. "What are you doing here?" I demanded.

"Whoa," said Charlie, putting his hands up in defense. Gently, he placed them on my shoulders and pushed me away. "I'm on your side, I thought you knew that."

"The only person on my side is _me._ "

Iggy cleared his throat loudly behind me.

"And them."

"That's the guy!" Nudge squealed, pointing frantically. "The guy who wrote on the receipt!"

My head was hurting, and this time I was _certain_ it was not from the concussion.

"What," I said, trying _very_ hard to keep myself from imploding, "the ever-loving _hell,_ is going on here?"

Emily handed her legal pad to Charlie. I saw the word _explain_ scribbled there.

"Christ, do I have a lot to tell you," Charlie said, leaning back against the shelf and running a hand through his hair. "God, I honestly didn't think you'd even figure it out—I've been sleeping off my concussion in a closet in her fucking lab just _praying_ you'd stop by—"

Next to me, Fang's arms were crossed, muscles and tendons and veins popping out in anger. When he spoke, his voice was dangerous and threatening. "Start talking."

Charlie stood up and took a seat at the long table, gesturing for us to do the same. "Okay. The night EU went down, I was trapped in there. I knew you'd gotten out, because I saw him grab you," he motioned to Iggy. "I knew Emily and Allie had gotten out, because I saw _him_ grab them," he gestured to Fang. "And I figured…" he puffed out a deep breath. "I figured, since I'd gotten myself into this mess, I might as well try and take out as many of them as I could, if I was going to die anyway."

Nudge had pulled off her heels and was massaging her feet. "What do you mean, 'got yourself into this mess?'"

He sighed. "Years ago, I was desperate for work," he said. "The market had just crashed, I'd been laid off, Emily had finallyfinished her doctorate in human genetics at UMich, complete with fifty G's of student loan debt, and on top of that we'd just found out she was pregnant. There was this advertisement for some research study on enhancing the human genome. I figured I'd join for extra money. Two months later, I was a superhuman employed at some forward-thinking biomedical lab. And it was great. Until the hours got too long and I started having side effects and I tried to quit, and then they—"

He closed his eyes, as if he couldn't speak anymore.

After a moment, Emily held up the legal pad. _Then they took Allie and I._

"Allie was only a baby but they were running tests on her, studying her, and that's when we realized we needed to start planning something big. But Rome wasn't built in a day. When you came along, you were special, you were kind, despite all of that crap that had happened to you—and I knew I had to help you, and hoped maybe you'd help me in return."

I snorted. Yeah, and rainbows, and ponies, and sunshine. "I call bullshit."

"Max—"

"No," I said, rising to my feet and pointing an accusatory finger at him. "I was there for years— _years—_ and you let them do _everything_ to me. You didn't _once—"_

"I needed an opportunity, Max," Charlie said, raising his voice just a bit. "If I ran around and started playing the good guy right away, they'd've killed me, my wife, my daughter. We were the ones who arranged for the breech in the medical wing that got you out in the first place. The three of us were supposed to be able to slip out right after you, but in the chaos, we couldn't do it inconspicuously enough."

A long silence rang throughout the room.

"They're telling the truth, Max," Angel said quietly. "Both of them. They're good guys."

"I could've sworn you were dead," Fang said. "I saw you. You looked like someone beat the shit out of you."

Charlie laughed bitterly. "Yeah, that's because somebody did. Mallory."

I chilled at the name. _He's alive_ , I thought, and I knew it was true. The sky was blue, the grass was green, and Mallory Smith was alive.

"Think he thought I was dead, too. Once word got around that the cops were coming, he split out of there."

Iggy swore loudly. Fang reached an arm around my shoulder. Charlie offered a sympathetic glance that I could've done without.

"He's alive. I don't know if you knew it or not. Acton's dead. But Mallory's alive."

"Keep talking," I said.

"I managed to drag myself out of there, snag one of the trucks in the lot, and disappear before anyone could track me."

"How the hell does _everybody_ know how to hotwire a car?" I asked, throwing my hands in the air. "This is getting a _little bit_ unrealistic."

"Nah, Teddy just always kept his keys in the glove compartment," Charlie added with a half-smile. "Anyway, I drove like a maniac back to our old house—I didn't know where else I could go. When I got there, Emily and Allie were waiting for me in the driveway. I couldn't believe it. It was a fucking miracle."

"Where's Allie now?" Fang asked quietly.

The two of them fell silent at this question. Charlie reached a hand out to grip Emily's. Her chest was wracking with silent sobs. They were painful to watch. _Was Allie—_

"With Emily's sister," Charlie said quietly, and I let out a relieved breath. "We went to her and explained what we could… she's unmarried, no kids of her own, and God bless her, she offered to drop everything, change her name, change Allie's name, and move. We don't know where they are. And until this is all over, we can't see Allie. It's too dangerous for her."

There was another period of silence that was only filled by Charlie's sniffing. "I wish I could go back and never take that job. If I knew what I knew now…"

"You can't do that to yourself," Nudge said quietly, reaching a hand out to caress his shoulder. "It's so easy to play the 'what if' game. You had no idea."

As bad as I felt for them, and as touchy-feely as this was all getting, I remained skeptical.

"Skip forward to the part where you knew we were in Death Valley."

Charlie ran the back of his arm over his nose, sniffing once, hard, and clearing his throat before he spoke. "From your records, I knew you'd come from the School. I asked old friends in other parts of the country to plant notes for me in other places—there's one at your old house, the other where Eugenics United burned down. When we had no luck with those, I thought I'd make the drive myself to Death Valley as a last-ditch effort. Sheer luck that it happened to be the same day you guys went there."

"We were followed," Iggy said. "Know anything about that?"

"Followed?"

"EU soldiers ambushed us just outside of Death Valley."

" _What?_ What do you mean, _EU soldiers?_ "

"I mean exactly what I said," I said, annoyed. "Soldiers. From EU. Four of them. With guns."

"They were shooting to kill," said Fang.

"No frigging way," Charlie said. He shook his head in disbelief. "Who?"

I rifled through my memory. "The tall redhead who ran Combat. Short blonde with the birthmark on his cheek, knew his way around a switchblade. The other two I didn't recognize."

"Eric and Levi." Charlie shook his head, a deep frown cutting the corners of his face. "Some of them are still loyal, even after all that. I'll never understand. Well, I hope you killed them."

Iggy mumbled under his breath, "Wish we had."

"We're not murderers," I said lowly, but couldn't ignore the niggling feeling that I, too, wish we had killed them. The image of Fang almost shooting that man on the linoleum of the sub shop flashed before my eyes.

"You're saying you knew _nothing_ about any of this?" Angel said, breaking me from my reverie.

Charlie looked surprised. " _Me?_ No way—they have no clue where I am. They think _she's_ dead," Charlie said, indicating to Emily. "I intend to keep it that way. I'm not going back to that place, or with those people, unless it's to wring their necks. I spent years trying to get out, and here I am. I'm free, so long as I can find my daughter."

He leaned forward on the table and met my eyes, and I was again struck by how deep and _brown_ his were. "But you're not, and I think you know that. And I think that's why you're here. Listen—in my time there, I climbed the ladder. Acton and I were Mallory's right-hand men. I know where Mallory and the boss are hiding."

"Where?" I demanded immediately.

"A safe house in Colorado. Right by a little place called Oak Creek."

It's funny how one small detail can make the whole big picture snap into place. How a single piece of a puzzle in the wrong spot can make the image chaotic and confused, but by adjusting it just one spot to the right, everything is crystal clear. Obvious, almost.

How had I not considered this?

Suddenly, my vision was blurring. The room got darker, suddenly, as if somebody had thrown a veil over my eyes. The nausea started to build up in my throat. From across the table, Nudge met my gaze and furrowed her eyebrows as if to ask, _What?_

"Colorado?" I whispered.

"That's where they're hiding, waiting to make their next move. I'm telling you—if you take them out, it's all over. All of this. Forever," he said sincerely. "The boss has been the mastermind behind all of these things for years, and Mallory's his number two. If you wipe them out, it's done."

"Colorado," I repeated. Fang gripped my shoulder, probably sensing my dizziness and anticipating a loss of consciousness. But I wouldn't—not yet, not until I knew, not until I was completely sure—

My voice was thick, crunchy, and barely audible. "A name."

"What was that?"

Next to me, a loud stream of violent curses fell from Fang's lips as the story came together for him, too. There was a loud _bang_ as his fist drove into the cabinetry. A beaker shattered. The rest of the flock looked on edge and confused.

"The boss," I continued shakily, a bit louder. "You must know his name."

"Batchelder," Charlie said. "Jeb Batchelder."

* * *

"Monsters" by Ruelle.

I've always had this little headcanon that the Gasman had—or would eventually develop—a crush on Nudge. Here's my little homage to that at the beginning here.

We're in the home stretch here, friends, so buckle your hats on Pilgrim-tight.

I'm also now realizing that I'm not sure what book this really would fit in after, if we were going by canon. I reread all the novels about a year ago, and now it seems like it might be post- _SOF_. Really, what I did was make my own sort of AU that didn't include the Martinezes, which totally fucked up everything. All you really need to know from here on out: obviously, Itex and the School have gone down years before. The flock knows Jeb is Max's father, and now it's revealed that Jeb was the head honcho of EU…

 _-the plot thickens-_

I'm sure you can grant me this gigantic lapse in canon/AUness, considering how full of holes the MR universe is at baseline. Shout out to James Patterson.

Finally, wow, it was so great to hear from everyone last chapter! That was my first chapter with more than one review in a while. I will never fault my ghost readers—I've done it myself a million times—but it was so great to know you're there :)


	23. Twenty-Three

A/N: I really am sorry. Real life dealt me the hardest blow I have had to deal with as of yet back in January, I am slowly, slowly, slowly picking up the pieces. This chapter has been written for a long time, I just have had so many things on my mind that I haven't gotten around to posting it. We're close to the end, folks, I'm sorry to drag it out so long.

* * *

 _Oh there ain't no rest for the wicked; money don't grow on trees  
I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed, there ain't nothing in this world for free  
Oh no, I can't slow down, I can't hold back though you know, I wish I could  
No there ain't no rest for the wicked until we close our eyes for good_

* * *

TWENTY-THREE

Fang's voice was repeating my name over and over. _Max, Max, Max._

One of his hands was on my shoulder and the other was around my waist, gripping me as if his life—or mine—depended on it.

"Everything okay in there, Cleo?" came the receptionist's voice from outside the door.

But Nudge said nothing—I caught her with the corner of my panicked gaze; her hands were clamped over her mouth in horror, tears already tracking down her cheeks.

"Fine, thanks!" Gazzy squeaked in a perfect imitation of Nudge. He added a tinkling laugh, emanating calm despite the chaos written on his face. "I'm a klutz, what can I say!"

My breaths were coming far too fast. I had experienced panic and disbelief before—both had become a new reality of mine in the past few weeks—but this particular revelation came with years of history and a man that I'd once trusted.

Of a man who was my _biological father._

We'd known Jeb was a liar way back when we were fourteen, and though it was still a sore spot, it wasn't the source of my agony. It was that he'd let them— _instructed_ them—to do such awful things to me, to imprison me, to keep me from my family.

Everything Mallory ever did, although he enjoyed it down to his very core, was still a direct order from the boss.

From _Jeb._

 _My father._

* * *

Things had gone from fine to incredibly, all-encompassingly _not_ fine in a matter of seconds.

Jeb.

"Get her on the ground," Iggy was saying, but Fang was frozen with unprocessed emotion, so it was Iggy who pushed down on her shoulders, tearing her from Fang's grip as she slid to the floor.

"Head between your legs, Max," Iggy said gently, like he was talking to a toddler. Gently, he guided her into a hunched over position. "Deep breaths. You're safe. We're here. We're not going anywhere."

Fang slammed back to reality, heart pounding, hands balled into fists. He loosened them and dropped to his knees, cupping her face in his hands. Her eyes, a beautiful hazel-brown that he'd never get sick of, were glassed over. No matter how hard he tried, she would not meet his gaze, instead staring somewhere far off. Her chest was rising and falling at an alarming rate.

"What's happening?"

"She's having a panic attack, she'll be alright," Iggy said, though he sounded shaken himself. "Deep breaths, Max, come on, you know the drill with these…"

"What did I say wrong?" said Charlie.

"We know Jeb," Angel said shakily. Fang felt the feeble attempts at calming waves she was sending dissipate like smoke before reaching him. "He was like our dad, when we were little."

" _Batchelder_ was?"

At his name, Max trembled even more violently. Fang held her to his side, trying to squeeze the tremors out of her, but she was beyond being comforted.

"Let me take her back to the car," said Gazzy. Fang immediately opened his mouth to protest, but Gazzy spoke over him. "Obviously, there's still some discussing to be done here," he said, gesturing to Charlie and Emily. "She's okay, let Angel and I get her out of here, maybe get her something to eat."

"There are vending machines in the lobby," Angel said. "The receptionist won't know who we are, I can fog her up so she doesn't see us going. Shoot some thoughts my way on your way out."

"I'm staying," Nudge said firmly, as though daring someone to challenge her.

Iggy nodded. "Me too."

"We've got her," Gazzy said. He bent at the waist and scooped Max up into his arms. It was surreal, Fang thought, that this was the same cowlicked boy from years ago. He'd certainly grown from those days, both physically and otherwise.

Iggy jammed a hand into his pocket and pulled out a few bills, handing them to Angel. "Try chocolate."

"Jesus," Charlie said once they were gone. "What the hell was that?"

Fang ran a hand through his hair, feeling like he needed to punch something. He'd seen Max unravel countless times—the majority of which were in the last few weeks—but he knew this was something different, something deeper, because Jeb was involved.

 _Involved,_ he thought, laughing bitterly to himself. Jeb was _responsible._ Jeb was _evil._ Jeb was…

"Jeb was the guy who broke us out of the school in the first place," Fang said. "He bottle-fed Angel, taught us to fly… and he raised Max to be the leader she was. He was one of the scientists there. Defected to break us out."

"Then we found out he was still on the wrong side of things and always would be," said Nudge.

"And, in summary, everything went to shit," Iggy said.

" _Bachelder?"_ said Charlie incredulously. "A _good_ guy? I don't know—he's tame at the surface, but…"

"Yeah," Fang said shortly, unwilling to let the images penetrate his mind's eye. "I'm getting the picture."

"We, uh," Iggy paused, looking toward Fang and Nudge as if for permission. "We thought he was trying to get back on the good guy side, last we knew…"

There was a moment of silence before Nudge sighed and spoke softly. "Right before she was taken, we found out…" she paused, took a deep breath, steeled herself to continue, but couldn't.

Fang saw red. "We found out he was her biological father."

Charlie's face twisted into one of rage and disgust. Emily gripped his arm, turning a pale shade of grey.

"For fuck's sake."

"You're telling us," Iggy muttered.

A thick silence blanketed over the five of them. Nudge's face was in her hands but her shoulders were shaking and Fang knew she was crying.

"I mean, he always spoke fondly of her," said Charlie, still looking like he wanted to be sick. "Like he cared about her, but… not like he wanted to really _take_ care of her. More like… she was a precious experiment, or a project."

Nudge growled lowly, grimacing as she scrubbed her face dry with her hands. "Or an _object_."

"He wanted her to 'save the world,'" Fang said. "At fourteen years old."

"Save the _world?_ "

"Yeah," Nudge said to Charlie, slumping backward in his chair, looking defeated. "That's what _we_ said."

"Trust me, that wasn't his concern when she was here," said Charlie, shaking his head. "It was all about the fact that she was the longest-surviving recombinant life form, that she was strong, that there was even more to learn from her ever-evolving chromosomes, that she was capable of reproducing with the correct research and trialing."

Fang raked his hands through his hair again, snarling unintentionally.

"We can't," Iggy said tightly. "Can't go there. Please."

Nudge was openly crying. "She's been doing so well, but this…"

"Can you blame her? I mean, Jeb. Jesus Christ…"

Iggy was leaning over one of the chairs at the table. The knuckles of his hands were white in the fluorescent light of the lab. "We thought he just dropped off the map. With the way things left off, I don't think _any_ of us thought he would've taken her from us."

"It was always in the back of my mind," Fang admitted. "But once we found out all the shit they did to her, I didn't think it would be him."

Iggy laughed once, bitterly, but didn't say anything.

"Okay," Nudge said, leaning forward in her chair again, clicking and unclicking a pen she'd picked up. "So now what do we do? I mean, obviously we're going there, right?"

"Yes," Iggy and Fang said immediately.

Iggy's teeth were bared. "When I get my hands on them…"

"You're certain they're there?"

Charlie looked to Fang and nodded. "That was always the back-up plan, to go there and wait until the media dust settled, if there was one. Obviously, if you turn on any news station, the dust is far from settling. It's a secure location that Jeb only gave out to a select few of us. Considering Acton is dead, and he thinks Emily and I are dead, I doubt that they'd have changed locations."

"Even if they aren't there, it's a place to start," Iggy said. He turned to Fang, unseeing eyes filled with rage. "When can we leave?"

"We can take one of the vans,"

Iggy grimaced. "We appreciate it, Charlie, really, but—"

"It's going to be way quicker and easier if we just go alone," Fang said. "It'll take a few days to fly there, but we should be able to find the place in no time."

"If what we're thinking is right, he built us a house on that same plot of land ten or so years ago," Iggy added. "Gazzy and I know our way around an explosive, we can just rig up a big one and drop it—""

Charlie had the audacity to laugh. "And you think it'll be that easy?

Iggy's eyebrow twitched with what Fang knew to be annoyance. "Blowing stuff up is pretty easy."

"So what if that doesn't work? You say he knows you all so well, don't you think he'll have thought these options through?"

"Didn't you just say he wouldn't be expecting anyone because it's a top-secret hideout?"

"Doesn't mean he won't be prepared," Charlie pointed out. "So after you try to blow it up and it doesn't budge, what, you'll swoop down there? Then what happens when Mallory pulls out some of the artillery they've been testing and unloads on you, or one of you gets your hands on Bachelder but you don't have the strength to kill him because of all the _nostalgia_?"

An in humane growl rumbled in the back of Fang's throat. "I don't think it'll be an issue."

"Guys." Nudge's gaze hopped from Fang, to Iggy, and back to Fang again. "Listen to what he's saying. I know you want this to be over—we all do—but this isn't Erasers that we're dealing with. This is beyond what we're used to. And if he knows the ins and outs of it, it's going to be worth it."

"This isn't something to rush," Charlie said, voice losing the harsh edge it had taken on. "Trust me—they imprisoned my daughter. They took my wife's voice. They took our lives." He toed a piece of the shattered beaker on the floor as Emily wrapped an arm around his bicep.

"We've been playing this game our whole lives," Nudge said to Iggy and Fang. "If a little more time means a little more manpower and a little preparation, then I'm willing to wait."

Iggy sighed heavily, leaning back in his chair. "And I thought Fang was the calm, cool, and collected one."

"Not when it comes to Max, he isn't," Nudge said with a half-grin. "Thank God for me."

She clicked the pen a final time and scribbled on the sheet of paper in front of her until the ink, scarlet and blotchy, bled onto the page. "Okay, so where do we start?"

* * *

When I came to, I was in the back seat of a moving vehicle, head pillowed on somebody's jeans. Before my brain had a minute to send a message to my sluggish limbs, though, a hand was at my temple, gently brushing a lock of hair from my eyes.

"Everything's fine," Fang said from above me. "We're all here."

"Man, you have _got_ to stop doing that," said Gazzy, attempting a joking tone that was lost to the nervousness that snuck in. "I think I've seen you unconscious more times in the last two weeks than I ever had before."

I bit back a groan.

"I'm thinking it's the concussion. You know, in addition to the hyperventilating. Your body can only do so much without enough oxygen to perfuse your—"

"Don't need a full lesson in medicine, Dr. Ride," Fang quipped.

"Well ex _cuse_ me," Iggy said with faux indignation. "The next time one of your sorry butts is bleeding out, don't come crying to _me._ "

Angel's face, worried but beautiful, appeared from my left. "How are you feeling, Max?"

Physically, I felt fine—a little tired, and that ever-present headache was as strong as ever—but emotionally, I was spent. I was used to getting kicked while I was down as much as the next girl, but this was getting a little bit ridiculous.

The nausea kicked in as I reconsidered what had happened in the laboratory. His name ricocheted around my head, no matter how hard I tried to block it out: _Jeb. Jeb. Jeb._

Suddenly, I was certain I was going to be sick. I rifled into a seated position, grabbing for the door handle in a panic. "Pull over," I demanded, despite the fact that I had no idea who was driving.

The car screeched to a stop and I scrambled by Angel and out the back door, barely even making it to the line of bushes before I was vomiting. I managed a half-groan before another bout of nausea overtook me.

Behind me, I heard the grinding of the van's door as it slid open. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I knew it was Fang approaching even before his hand was rubbing my back. "Alright?" he murmured.

"Awesome. Never better. Truly living the dream."

I spit a couple of times to rid my mouth of the awful, acidic taste of bile. Fang wordlessly handed me a water bottle and I rinsed a couple of times.

As I rose to my feet I stumbled to the side a bit. Fang's arms darted out to steady me, his eyes drilling holes through me.

"I'm fine," I said, but I didn't even try to act like I meant it. I was exhausted, I was hurting, and I was supremely _pissed off._

Fang shot me a _I'll choose not to comment right now, but don't think you've gotten out of this one_ look. "We have a plan. Didn't want to wake you because I know you need your rest, but now that you're up…"

"Where are we going?" I asked. I gestured to the front seat of the van I'd just busted out of, where Charlie and Emily were folded over an iPhone screen.

"Long story. I'll tell you in the car."

As much as I was itching to know what was going on, the thought of getting back in the van made every single cell of my body revolt. "Where's our next stop? I can fly above you guys, track you from a decent altitude."

"You need to rest, Max."

"What I _need_ is to not be locked back up in a utility van when I have perfectly functioning wings and a _serious_ claustrophobia problem."

"What's going on? Max, you okay?"

Iggy had clambered out of the van and was advancing on us, his ear cocked in my direction as if listening for distress.

Neither Fang nor I said anything. I sucked back the rest of the bottled water, praying to some higher power that the slamming behind my eyes would subside to a dull roar.

Finally, I said, "I'm not getting back in there."

"What, the van?" Iggy said. He shrugged. "We need to stop for food anyway, refuel. Meet us at the next truck stop off the freeway, it's only ten or so miles northeast of here."

Only now did I realize that it was distinctly cooler than Las Vegas weather. A layer of goosebumps broke out over my skin and I rubbed my arms.

Fang retreated to the van and pulled out my windbreaker. He gave me a long, scrutinizing look, and then jerked a thumb in the air. "Age before beauty."

* * *

Tracking a car was a much more leisurely sort of flying, especially when it was Fang and I. We almost had to pull back and fly slower than was comfortable so as to not lose sight of the truck winding its way along the deserted interstate.

No matter what, it was better than being trapped in that car.

Fang had given me the skeleton details of the plan: Charlie would accompany us to our old plot in Colorado, which was apparently a new secret lair, we'd go about this the calculated and responsible way, and by no means was I to jump into super speed and head there myself to spare the flock.

"I'll tackle you straight out of the sky," Fang said seriously, his eyes taking on a black-hole wrath. I considered calling his bluff, but the more I thought about it, the more evident it became that he wasn't bluffing.

Now, he was flying just below me and to my left, the tips of his wings brushing mine occasionally as he adjusted his direction. It was hard not to admire his jet-black, oil-slick wingspan and the downright majestic way he maneuvered himself through the air.

He must've felt my eyes on him, because he met my gaze and offered an encouraging half-smile.

I must've not given one back, because his expression swapped to one of concern. _Here we go again,_ I thought, because I'd been on the receiving end of pity and worry and all sorts of other sappy shit for the past few weeks and I was getting sick of it.

Maybe he read it from my face and changed his tune, or maybe it had been what he wanted to say all along, but all that came from his mouth was a soft, short, "Wanna talk about it?"

And to my own surprise, I _did_ want to.

But this wasn't the time or the place. When this was all over, I'd talk about it. All of it.

For now, I shook my head, tucked a lock of stray hair behind my ear, and sighed. "I'm just… _exhausted_."

Fang's eyes softened in the way they only ever did for me. "Never been simple for you, has it?"

"It's never been simple for _any_ of us."

"We had a little taste of normalcy. For you, it's just been one thing after the other ever since that day they took Angel from us."

It was strange to think of that as the catalyst for all of this. If they had never come for her that day, would we still be living in the E-house? Would we have lived uneventful lives?

The implications of that cleaved a giant hole through me. _Don't,_ I told myself. _It is what it is._

Fang had moved to fly next to me, matching his wing strokes with mine so our feathers overlapped even more. "When all of this is over, we'll take a break. A _real_ break. Somewhere warm. And isolated."

"Ah, the classic 'let's find an island.'"

A crooked smile settled on Fang's lips. "Something like that."

Below us, the van pulled off the interstate and into a deserted rest area.

"Really think this is the end of this?" I asked Fang as we adjusted our wings to land in a clearing behind the gas station.

Fang met my eyes; his typically masked expression was open. "I hope so," he said, and then he began his descent, wings fluttering like a mirage in the sunlight.


	24. Twenty-Four

I don't have to explain myself, but I will, anyway: I know it's been a while. An unacceptable amount of time, really. In my last update, I mentioned that life had dealt me a tough blow—that was the understatement of the century. I have been working on myself (and my mental health) for the entirety of 2018, and I am finally at a point where I am focusing on doing things that bring me joy, even on a small scale: writing poetry, making music, the outdoors, writing FanFiction.

I am really excited to finish this story and start something new (and maybe a bit more canon-adherent). I just ordered a new box set of the first three books (honestly, probably the only 3 I truly consider my own headcanon). For those of you who stuck around, this is for you. It should be one more chapter after this, plus an epilogue, unless more comes to me during the editing process.

Without further ado…

* * *

 _Trying hard, I nearly find innocence in spite of me  
A creature that would terrify any child left inside of me  
Oh, that's a cold insight; nothing above us and nothing below  
Ah, but you might be right, if there is no heaven and there is no soul_

* * *

TWENTY-FOUR

"Well," Iggy said, voice thick with bitter nostalgia, "it sure _smells_ the same."

We were about a mile or so away from where the E-shaped house lay in ruins near Oak Creek, up on a carved-out piece of mountainside we'd frequented when Fang, Iggy and I were teaching the younger kids to fly. This granted us a good view of the plot without giving away our location.

We hoped.

"Looks a hell of a lot different," Fang muttered.

In typical Fang fashion, this was the Understatement of the Year. The ledge each arm of the E had been cantilevered on had collapsed into a sharp slope, probably from Iggy and Gazzy's stunt fifty lifetimes ago. In place of the grass clearing formerly lush with evergreen trees and berry patches at the bottom was a huge landscape with nothing but sand and a low-to-the-ground building that appeared to be made of cement. And turrets. Lots of turrets.

Protecting what, I almost didn't want to know.

We'd left Emily with the van a mile or so away at a nearby lake. The plan was to bust in, settle this once and for all, and then rendezvous at the van.

Sounded easy enough, sure. But none of us had the slightest idea as to what "settling this" would entail.

Once he caught up to us and laid eyes on the scene before him, Gazzy put on a grizzly voice and started singing a song I'd never heard before. _"I was in the pit, you were in the pit—_ OW!"

Iggy, with breakneck speed and impossible aim, smacked the Gasman on the back of the head. His blind eyes were exhausted. "Not the time."

Nudge mumbled a deep sound of dissent. She had traded her Cleo the Department of Health Inspector getup for her faded blue Nike tee shirt and jeans.

"'Save the world,'" she mocked, "'you have to save the world—meanwhile, let's knock down all the trees and kill all the plants and the ecosystem and build evil lairs and try to murder all the good people.'"

Charlie let out a low whistle as he appeared behind us. "He sure wasn't kidding," he murmured cryptically.

I already felt my patience reaching its end. My head was pounding, my stomach was churning, and my mind felt like that fuzzy black and white screen that popped up when your cable got disconnected. This was not the time for mysterious half-sentences.

Iggy, terminally out of the loop, must've felt the same way, because he said, "Care to elaborate?"

"I've seen the plans of this place, discussed it with Mallory before. If the outside is any indication…"

I was ready to explode. Could he finish a thought?

Next to me, Iggy mirrored my anxiety, muttering under his breath so low only I could hear it, "Any day now…"

"…then it's just as messed up as they planned," Angel finished quietly, her blue eyes huge as she read Charlie's thoughts.

"But you never know!" Charlie said quickly, reading our faces with a look of guilt on his own. "It could be—"

"Sunshine and roses?" I barked, feeling my composure snap like a rubber band. "We've dealt with murderous man-wolves, prodding scientists, evil clones, and exploding brains. We can handle it."

Charlie looked like he wanted to say something more but decided against it.

"Iggy, are you getting a perimeter?"

"Already tried. If there's one here, it's not something I can detect."

Reassuring, but not entirely. "Nudge?" I tried.

Nudge dropped to one knee and pressed her palms into the dirt, bowing her head forward as if in prayer. After a moment, she rocked back onto her heels, shaking her head and dusting her hands off on her jeans. "Me either."

" _I fell in the pit—"_

Iggy groaned. "Stop—"

"— _you fell in the pit—_ "

"Gazzy, I swear to—"

"— _we all fell in the piiiiiiit—_ OW!" Gazzy bent to massage his shin where Fang had kicked him, hard. "Just trying for a little bit of comic relief, jeez."

My head was starting to throb even worse. "Okay, no perimeter," I said, rubbing my temple. "That's good."

"Last I heard, there was no automated security system," Charlie said. "Only a few people even knew this place existed. They were counting on that as their safety net."

Gazzy snorted. "So, now what? We just walk in the front door?"

* * *

Fang vetoed my plan before I'd even opened my mouth to start explaining.

I huffed out a beyond-frustrated sigh. "If you'd let me _explain—_ "

Fang's eyes were unreadable, but his jaw was tight. "Next suggestion."

"Did I miss something?" the Gasman said.

"They're doing that thing again where Fang reads Max's mind," Iggy said dully. "Would either of you like to fill us in?"

"Max wants to walk through the front door. Alone."

"What, like bait?" Gazzy's eyes were wide.

Next to him, Angel narrowed her own eyes, an exact replica of the Gasman's. "Max…"

"Despite what Fang may _think_ ," I said icily, "this is not a suicide mission. If I get in there, I can distract them, and feed Angel directions. I'm what they want. I know Mallory better than any of you. And I know Jeb, too." Fang opened his mouth to speak, but I held up a hand. "This is not like last time. I _know_ you guys have my back. I _know_ you'll be coming in to back me up. This is just a way to get in."

 _And if I never make it out, hopefully it'll be just me they capture,_ I thought.

Across from me, Angel scowled. Crazy how after this many years I _still_ tended to forget that we had a mind reader in our little ragtag band of mutants. I chalked it up to being imprisoned for half a decade.

 _That isn't going to happen,_ I thought at her.

 _We're not leaving you behind,_ she huffed in my mind. _Remember what Fang said? You die when we die._

You die when we die. He _had_ said it, hovering over where I knelt in blood-soaked sand, tendons peeking from my massacred forearm. I'd been fourteen, carrying a universe on my shoulders, and I'd finally cracked under the pressure.

 _You're still 98% human, Max,_ Angel's voice said delicately. _Nobody can handle that much stress. Not then, not now. That's why there's six of us. All for one, and all that._

Well, she certainly wasn't six years old anymore.

"Am I missing something?" Iggy said, rubbing an annoyed hand over his forehead. "Still blind, over here."

"They're doing that thing where Angel reads Max's mind," Fang muttered dully.

"I walk in the door, tell Mallory I came to settle everything once and for all, and—"

"And… he's going to buy that, and totally not think we're outside waiting to ambush them _why?_ "

I was grateful Iggy couldn't see me flush. I hadn't considered that. I refused to look at Fang, who I knew was biting back some sort of I-told-you-so smile.

Instead, I looked at the rest of the flock, letting a huge puff of air blow a stray overlong hair out of my face. Nudge had secured it in a long plait before we'd left the burger joint a few hours ago, despite my begging for her to just hack it off ("I will _not_ use Iggy's pocket knife to deface this masterpiece!").

" _Okay_ ," I huffed. I was beyond annoyed, ready for this to be over, and—news flash—still concussed. "Does anybody have any better ideas?"

Charlie, a head taller than even Iggy, coughed quietly from his place at the back of the group. "Let me go first. Just… just promise me you'll back me up," he said. "I can't leave my daughter fatherless, not after everything she went through because of me."

"Of course we'll back you up," Gazzy snorted, totally missing the deep emotion behind Charlie's deep voice. "You're the only reason we got out of that place."

"And me, the first time," I added. I took a few cautious steps toward Charlie, marveling at his strength, his sturdy frame, his height. The genes they'd modified him with were so different from ours—we were strong, sure, but light, nimble, and quick—yet despite all of these contrasts all of us were still battered, broken, exploited mutants with crosses to bear.

I put a gentle hand on his arm. "I can't ask you to do this."

Deep down, I knew it was our only logical chance, the only way we could sneak in truly undetected, but at the same time, that niggling voice inside my head (read: my stubborn conscience) could not logically expect this man to put his life on the line when he had a child waiting desperately for him.

Charlie offered me a small, sad half-smile. "No, but I can tell you I'm going to. I know you'd never ask me. That's what makes you so much better than them, than most of us," he said, brown eyes impossibly warmer than even before. "You deserve peace, Max. Let me try to right some of my wrongs."

Fang and I shared a brief look. The guilt I felt myself radiating was nearly palpable in the air, but Fang cocked his head a centimeter to the side.

 _Let him_ , he was saying. _Please._

* * *

I surveyed the doorway. No cameras that I could see anywhere. No guns mounted on the walls. No security system whatsoever.

Get this—the door was unlocked.

Charlie was right. Not a shred of protection.

I considered this before entering. If you had a top-secret lair on a piece of private property in the middle of the Colorado woods, well camouflaged by thick trees, would you feel the need to lock the secret lair?

What about if you were hoping a former prisoner might stroll in under her own willpower?

 _If a tree falls in the woods…_

I took a deep breath and held it for a moment. _Don't think_ , I told myself. _Just go._

The flock (Fang) had reluctantly agreed to let me stroll in after giving Charlie a bit of a head start. The idea was that if I somehow _was_ detected, I would probably be able to cause enough of a distraction to allow the rest of the flock to swoop in and back me up.

Ideally, it was six human-avian hybrids and one superhuman against Jeb and Mallory. They weren't the worst odds, but they had home field advantage.

A long hallway greeted me after I stepped through the door. The entire building appeared to be made of concrete, with the cheap light fixtures installed overhead casting a yellow glow over the space. Huge, galvanized ductwork was exposed overhead, and I marveled at our luck in terms of ventilation lately.

 _Birdkid-sized HVAC system,_ I thought as loudly as I could, praying Angel could hear me. _Front door was unlocked and I haven't been jumped yet. Do some recon from above, find another way in._

For a moment, nothing but silence. A minute later: _Fang found an entryway on the south wall. Iggy, Nudge and Gazzy are going to head in through the front door in about five minutes. I'm going to go with Fang through the ducts._

 _Be careful._

A pause. Then, _Fang says to tell you he's rolling his eyes._

I allowed myself a small smile. _Bite me._

As I walked slowly down the hall, I peered into the small rooms on either side of me. This seemed more like a bunker than anything; there were several small, square rooms with nothing in them. One room was filled with nothing but MREs and bottled water. I wondered what sort of nuclear holocaust Jeb had imagined up now.

 _Whoops. Sorry about not saving the world,_ I thought icily, _got a little busy, what with being enslaved and all._

At last, I came to the end of the long hallway. A set of glass double-doors was waiting for me there, leading into what looked like headquarters of some sort. The far wall had a massive screen. It was displaying a map of the United States.

 _Huge control room, dead center of this place,_ I thought at Angel. I looked up. _There's a vent right here. Are you guys close by?_

 _Just getting in the ducts now. I can sense where you are. The others are close behind you. Fang and I should be there in two minutes._ Another moment of silence, then: _I can't get anything from Mallory or Charlie because of their mutations, but Jeb doesn't suspect anything. He's talking to Charlie now._

I took a deep breath and peered through one of the glass doors. There was a small office off the side of the room with a frosted-glass window; I could see blurred forms behind it.

I let the breath hiss through my teeth. _Now or never,_ I thought, and I pushed the door open as quietly as I could.

Whatever I was expecting didn't happen. No blaring alarm, no net falling from the ceiling to trap me, nothing. Nothing greeted me but the whirring of computers and a dull _blip_ that seemed to be coming from the map.

When I looked closer, I saw a pulsing, red dot over the exact part of Colorado we were in. _AE1—"Max,"_ it was labeled.

They knew. They'd always known.

 _They'd been tracking me the entire time._

Everything changed in that moment, just as a crushing force nearly ruptured my windpipe.

The hands wrapped around my neck were impossibly huge. He squeezed once, twice; wildly, I wondered if I would feel the snapping of my spine or if I'd die before the pain registered—

"You never should've tried to leave," the voice hissed. My blood ran ice cold and I gasped for breath that was not there.

 _Mallory, tracing the line of my jaw with a blood-stained, grimy-nailed fingertip; Mallory, landing punch after punch and smiling as he did so; Mallory, breaking the only innocent parts of me left, leaving me battered and bruised and alone._

My pulse was thundering in my ears and I clawed hectically at the death grip on my neck—I tried to gasp, tried to scream, banged a palm against the wall. _Not like this_ , I thought, _not like this, I will_ not _die like this—_

His hands loosened for a split second and I wheezed in a huge breath, fighting the urge to cough as the speckles in my vision cleared for a moment. The smell of cigarettes and day-old sweat flooded my nostrils and I gagged. "Nnn—"

"No matter how many times you get away, bird girl, I will never stop coming for you," he said insidiously. "The company might be gone, Batchelder might be a useless pawn—but you are _mine_ , and everyone who works for me knows it—" And then he was dragging me by the neck across the room—I couldn't see, the darkness was creeping in—

" _Max?_ " I heard from a short distance away, and I felt my heart soar. Iggy's perfect ears must've heard the chaos. I heard his shout for backup and his usually soft footsteps thundering through the doorway.

Jeb's voice split through the chaos. "Mallory!"

Mallory's hands were gone from my neck then and I was face first on the concrete. A snap that could only be my nose filled my ears followed by an explosion of pain and blood. For a brief, fleeting moment, I thought that that was it—it was over, I was safe—but I didn't see the boot coming for my head until it had already made solid contact.

A crippling, skull-splitting, worse-than-a-brain-explosion pain erupted behind my eyelids and the air filled with the sound of my own screams. Whatever lucid part of me was left recognized that I'd never made quite that sound before.

I couldn't see, couldn't think. I was vaguely aware of Mallory's form hovering over me, and I heard the telltale cock of a gun. This was it, I thought mildly. It's over. He won.

There was a flurry of movement—a body, a gunshot, an exquisite, earth shattering pain to my arm and chest, and the definitive _thwack_ of my head hitting the concrete.

And then pure, blissful silence, like the vacuum of a black hole after a supernova.

* * *

Fang followed the sound of Iggy's panicked voice and Max's angry struggle, and that was all it took to get him through the ducts and out through the vent in four seconds flat.

 _She's gone again,_ the pessimist in him lamented. No sense of urgency, no shred of reasonable doubt; that was it: _you lost her again._

The door to the room nearly came off its hinges as he catapulted through it. The air was frigid and the smell of antiseptic stung his nose. Charlie was hurdling toward the huge, rugged form that was Mallory, who was hovering over Max with what looked like a .50 caliber rifle to her head.

Jeb stood in the doorway of the abutting office, eyes wide in his face. "Mallory—!"

Fang's indifference was water under the bridge, now. Fuck the School, fuck Jeb, fuck EU, fuck _all of_ it. This was it, once and for all; he was going to end it. And he was bringing the entire flock to safety if it was the last thing he did.

But he was too far away, Iggy was too far away—there was no time, this was it, he was going to lose her— _"NO!"_

Mallory's finger found the trigger. Fang was still two yards away and pouring on the speed when he saw—

Jeb. It was Jeb, from the corner of the room; Jeb, launching himself toward Max's collapsed form.

The gun went off. A single bullet exploded from its tip, and Fang watched as it disappeared into Jeb's neck, sucking the life from his pale blue eyes as it did.

Charlie barreled into Mallory, catching him off-guard and forcing him to the ground. The sound was like a thunderclap; Fang felt it down to his bones.

As their bodies cleared the area, he saw Max. Beautiful, fearless Max; stubborn, drove-him-crazy Max; bleeding, dying Max. The bullet had somehow clipped her ribcage, just to the left of her heart, and her left bicep. Her face was covered in blood, but she wasn't moving.

 _She wasn't moving._

Fang kicked into autopilot and ran as fast as his body would take him.

* * *

I was dead. I knew it. Like, _the sky is blue, the grass is green, and Max is dead_ knew it. But it was sort of a has-been kind of knowledge—as Nudge would say, "Um, duh?"

There was a complete feeling of peace, being dead. No sense of urgency, no feelings of regret. Just finality. It almost felt like… relief.

I don't know how long I spent in limbo. I'd never experienced such nothingness—not even in the isolation tank back at Itex. Then, I'd been in a state of panic. Now, the emotions washed away, like watercolor paint on an overturned canvas.

Then came the noise, and with it, an unfathomable amount of pain. I heard my name; over and over and over again, distant, like I was underwater.

I couldn't move, I couldn't see; there was just that one syllable— _Max—_ and the dancing inferno of agony behind my eyelids. And I instantly knew I wasn't dead—I was alive, however barely.

Sounds became less distorted, my eyelids not as heavy. There was a body hovering over me, its lips so close to my ear that even in my daze I could feel the warm puffs of his breath as he spoke.

"Max," Fang said, and I could hear the tidal wave of panic in his trembling tenor, almost making his voice unrecognizable.

Somewhere behind him, I could hear Iggy bellowing, louder and angrier than I'd ever heard him. To my right—Angel bawling hysterically.

" _Are you happy?"_ Iggy was screeching. _"Is this what you wanted?"_

"Max."

The sound of bone on skin. Iggy's breaths, quick and murderous; Jeb's low, gurgling pleas.

"Fang," Nudge was saying nervously, "Fang—she's not—please, she isn't... tell me she isn't—"

Fang repeated, "Max." But his voice cracked a fraction at the end. I felt tugging at my shirt near the pain, like he was trying to rip a hole in it. When his frenzied fingers brushed my ribcage, it was like a hot fire poker melting my skin.

 _I'm not dead,_ I thought determinedly. _I'm not dead, I'm alive, I'm alive…_

I tried to force myself to move, but an angry cloud of red erupted behind my eyelids. I tried to groan but couldn't—I felt my body twitch a millimeter. It was enough.

Fang stopped breathing. This time, when he said it, it was a whispered question.

"Max?"

When I opened my eyes, I felt my heart pounding my chest and the quick, shallow breaths I couldn't stop taking.

Oddly, I did not feel pain.

"Jeb," I said, allowing my right arm to follow my gaze and reach toward him. He was on his back next to me, gasping for air. Every so often he coughed and an ugly mess of dark, angry blood spurted from his mouth.

Iggy was hovering over him, eyes looking just past me, ear cocked in my direction. His hands were spattered with red. He looked like a fair-haired Angel of Death.

"Max," Fang was saying, and I felt someone's warm hands on my chin. I resisted the tug of their hand and kept my eyes on Jeb.

I knew he was dying. An irreversible sort of dying, even in my crazy world of genetics and hybrids and superhumans.

"Jeb," I repeated, my voice cracking. It was useless to try to speak to him, and I didn't even know what I wanted to say. _Thanks for busting me out of the School and teaching me how to use an oven, but I'll never forget you for being a sick, twisted motherfucker, so rot in hell, you scum?_

But what had Mallory sad? _Batchelder was a pawn?_

Fang and Iggy were next to me (how had he gotten over there?), trying to talk to me, pressing and prodding on my arm. I vaguely registered that the bullet that had passed through Jeb's neck had then clipped me in the bicep and skimmed part of my ribcage, but I was lost in Jeb's dying eyes, full of something that I knew he wanted to say but could not.

 _Shock,_ I thought mildly. _This is shock._

I reached for his left hand, put my right one in it—though he had aged, his hands felt the same; warm, soft, and comforting.

Now, they held a strip of paper in them. In my daze, I pulled it toward me, dangling it in front of my eyes. I saw a flicker of his neat penmanship, albeit rushed; it was the big, curly 'M' he'd start with when writing my full name. I remembered it so clearly from the day he'd taught me to spell it. _M-A-X, for short,_ he'd said.

My arm got tired, though, and I had to rest it back down, clenching the paper as tight as I could manage in my clammy fist.

That's when the shock wore off.

* * *

"Blood" - Hozier


	25. Twenty-Five

_She broke down the other day, yeah you know  
Some things in life may change  
But some things, they stay the same_

 _Like time; there's always time on my mind_  
 _So pass me by, I'll be fine_  
 _Just give me time_

* * *

TWENTY-FIVE

Just as Fang was ready to force her to look away from Jeb, like the flick of a switch, Max curled herself into a ball on the cold concrete, hands clutched over her head, and made the most devastating, heart-stopping noise he'd ever heard _anything_ —human or otherwise—make, a shrieking sort of wail that he had no idea she was capable of.

He leapt to action instantaneously, wiping his filthy hands off on his jeans before skimming them over her arms, legs, back, face, trying to search for another obvious injury aside from where the bullet had clipped her ribcage and her bicep. Then he registered the dirt on the side of her head and the bundle of cartilage that had once been her already-bruised nose. And then it made sense.

She'd been kicked with a steel-toed boot. In the head. And she was already concussed.

He had almost lost her again, because of that monster. He gave Max one last long look and then tapped the back of Iggy's hand before rising to his feet and stalking across the concrete.

In the moments he'd been distracted, Charlie had somehow ended up crumpled in the corner of the room, a puddle of deep, red liquid growing beneath him. It was particularly concerning that he was not moving, and a ghostly whisper flitted through his brain: _"I can't leave my father daughterless."_

Fang glanced to the left.

The Gasman was one giant, walking bruise. One eye was swollen almost entirely shut. Mallory landed a blow to his side and Gazzy staggered back, limping on one foot until he collapsed to his knees.

Nudge dropped from the air onto Mallory, shoving a boot into the base of his neck. There was a _crack_ but Mallory barely flinched, raising an arm to bat Nudge away like a bothersome insect. She dropped like a stone to the cement, moaning and pulling herself onto all fours. Her eyes met Fang's, pretty face tugged into a grimace.

This was the time for a split decision:

Tend to Charlie and make sure he was okay, knowing he'd made an incredible sacrifice to help them, help Max—or protect the flock, his little brother and sister, the only family he'd ever known.

It was a no brainer.

 _I'm sorry,_ he thought. And he turned to Nudge and the Gasman.

They were outmatched, Fang knew. Mallory had been so mutated, so augmented, that no amount of agility and street smarts would defeat him. Fang knew his only option was something Jeb had forbidden and Max had strongly enforced.

Fang clenched his teeth. Neither was in any shape to do anything about it now.

He shot knowing glances to Nudge and Gazzy, who, bless their hearts, seemed to understand him. Then he turned his focus to Mallory, who was already glowering at him.

"You're dead, you know," the bigger man said, smiling wide enough to show his yellowed, rotting teeth. "It's over."

Fang's voice reached a lethal pitch. "You're right," he hissed. "I think it is."

In a flurry of movement, Gazzy leapt up and charged Mallory, who raised his gun and aimed to kill. As his finger found the trigger, a blurred, brown figure zipped from behind him, throwing an elbow and knocking the gun out of his hand. It clattered to the floor and its momentum carried it across the concrete to Fang's waiting feet.

Everything happened very quickly then.

The Gasman eyed Nudge, who Mallory had grabbed by the hair, and shot Fang a panicked glance. "Fang!"

Fang ducked for the gun and rose to his feet. He'd shot a gun before, once, when Jeb had given them all a crash course— _rule one is to never use a gun,_ Jeb had said somberly, _but rule two is to know how to use one properly, if you ever have to—_ but Mallory had Nudge by the head and Fang knew it was now or never, he had one chance—

Fang's finger found the trigger. He aimed carefully at Mallory's chest and fired once.

Before Fang could wonder if he'd made contact, Mallory collapsed to the ground.

Gazzy's reaction was immediate—in a second flat he'd roared up to Nudge and grabbed her under the arms, hauling her as far away as he could manage.

But Fang wasn't finished.

As far back as he could remember, he had never felt like this. Not when the whitecoats took Iggy's sight, not when they ran Nudge to the point of heat stroke when she was five, not even when he'd found out about what Max had gone through back at Eugenics United. This was an emotion unlike anything he could ever imagine.

It was rage, multiplied by a million. It was agony.

Without thinking, he fired the gun again. And again. A fourth time. Mallory's body jerked as it absorbed each bullet, but Fang could still see the shallow rise and fall of his chest.

Fang threw the gun aside and dropped to his knees in front of the body. Mallory's eyes rolled lazily in their sockets, finally finding Fang's.

A twisted smile came to his pale lips. "She's… mine," Mallory heaved out. Blood coated his mouth and bubbled over onto his chin and chest.

"Bullshit," Fang spat, and bent down to pound a punch into Mallory's nose.

Fang wanted to watch the life drain from his eyes, wanted to force this sick, sorry man to beg for mercy as he suffocated on his own blood. He threw another punch— _thwack_ , and Mallory's right cheek shattered under his knuckles—Max was still screaming behind him— _thwack,_ left cheek—Iggy was talking loudly to what sounded like himself as he tried to decide what to do— _thwack,_ chin—Fang hauled his arm back, hand coiled in a white-knuckled fist, ready to strike again and he—

—stopped, when he felt Nudge's hand on his shoulder.

For a moment, all Fang could hear was his own panting, his blood racing in his ears. All he could see were her eyes.

For as long as they'd been a flock, Nudge had always been the most expressive. Her beautiful face bloomed with each emotion she felt. There was no "poker face" or "stoicism" or "masked feelings" when it came to Nudge.

So now, the compassion written all over her features was almost enough to knock Fang right on his ass.

Nudge knelt close to him, eyes angled up to meet his. "She needs you," she whispered, tipping her head toward Max. "It's over. We won. You did what you had to do. Let Gazzy and I handle the rest."

Her eyes said the words that she did not. _This is not who you are. This will haunt you. It's already going to._

Fang nodded once and rose, diving to Max's side.

Angel was there, eyes huge in her face. She shot a glance at Max and then cried out, clasping her hands over her own head as she did so.

" _Oh,_ not good," she moaned. Her eyes popped open again and she gave Fang a panicked look. "Her thoughts—"

Max screamed again, and Fang was sure he would die from the sadness and rage and agony that sliced through him. She rolled back and forth on the ground, hands cradling her head, muttering gibberish and nonsense in between cries—

"What's happening?" Iggy said from beside him. His tentative hands dusted over Max's body, and he, too, couldn't find another injury. There was a distinctive terror to his voice. " _Fang_ , what's happening?"

The hairs on the back of Fang's neck stood up and he whipped his head around—

"He's dead," Nudge said as she threw the first aid kit at Fang's knees and crouched next to him. She unzipped the bag and started rifling through its contents, apparently at a loss as to what she should be looking for. Gazzy was hot on her heels, and Fang took a moment to process the amount of blood on his clothes before his mind compartmentalized and returned to Max.

" _Who's dead?"_ Iggy cried.

"Mallory," Fang forced out through gritted teeth. "Where is she hurt?"

"The bullet only grazed her but then she started screaming—"

Max started to gag, and Iggy dove into action, turning onto her side with milliseconds to spare. Even in her odd state of semiconsciousness, she groaned as she vomited, a hand still feebly pressed to her temple.

"Fuck," Iggy muttered, fisting a hand into his hair. Fang recognized this as an unparalleled panic, a type of fear that he'd never once seen in Iggy. "Fuck, fuck, _fuck._ This is bad. This is _bad."_

"This feels like more than a concussion," Angel whimpered. "Oh, man…"

That was it.

"I'm calling it," Fang said, rocking back onto his heels. His hands were smeared with Mallory's blood, his heart was thrashing in his chest, he was certain he was going to throw up.

He would not lose her to this.

"Fang—"

"We're our of options. We're going. I'm calling it."

Iggy looked terrified. "How are we going to—"

" _Hey!_ " the Gasman interrupted. He was standing tall, wings ruffled out slightly behind him, face wild with fear and anxiety. Blood was spattered on his shirt, his face, his hands. He looked like a blonde-haired, blue-eyed angel of death. "None of this matters if she's _dead!_ So let's get a _move on!_ "

* * *

Each time he looked at Max, he felt his heart break a little bit more.

The crisp linens were pulled to her chin—she was unconscious, but he knew she was cold. She had not a cubic inch of fat on her and was finally recoveringfrom both her torture and the two weeks of absolute insanity that followed it. He would do just about anything to even marginally increase her comfort.

Beneath the sheets, her skin was marred. He already had her injuries memorized and had started meticulously planning their care for whenever they made it out of here.

The laceration to left side of her head, just above her ear, had earned her twelve stitches, two inside and ten externally. The stitches would dissolve with time. That part of her head had been shaved, baby hairs already growing in thanks to their rapid cell replication. He'd watched the brainwashed nurses (thanks to Angel, the entire medical staff was blissfully unaware of or indifferent to her wings) clean the area with a saline mix three times daily over the course of the two days they'd spent here.

The gunshot wounds, albeit scarier looking, were markedly less worrisome. Because the bullet had hit the muscle-ridden area of her bicep, Max would be sore for "months" (Fang guessed a week tops, judging by how his abdominal muscles had responded to his old bullet wound). Her ribcage had taken the worst of the hit, and he knew that splintered ribs hurt like a bitch, but they'd been hurt worse dozens of times.

Her nose would never look the same, not that she or anyone would care. They'd done their best to set it, but it had been broken so many times that he knew it would undoubtedly heal more crookedly than the times before it.

The impressive bruising head to toe was hard to look at but would fade with rest. Knowing this didn't make it any easier to look at.

Angel stepped back into the room, looking like she'd recently been resurrected from the dead. Fang couldn't imagine the exhaustion she was experiencing—her abilities were far more advanced than years ago, but the magnitude of staff she had to ward off was growing with each passing hour.

Like with so many other things in their life, Fang could not help her. There was no way he could ease this burden. They had no choice: she had to do it.

Wordlessly, Angel dropped like a stone into the chair by Max's bedside. Fang perched on the arm and wrapped an arm around her, pulling her blond curls tight to his side.

Angel collapsed into him. Fang felt her sigh heavily into the scratchy, hospital gift shop tee shirt he'd replaced his ragged, bloody one with two days ago.

"She's going to be okay," Angel whispered. It was more of a question than a statement.

Fang opened his mouth to speak but found he had no words. His cheeks were tight from the heavy frown that had settled on his lips, his forehead hurt from the wrinkle that he saw in the mirror every time he splashed his face in front of the bathroom sink.

She had to be okay. They'd made it this far. _She'd_ made it this far. This was not the way he would lose her, this was not the way she would go.

So Fang just nodded and rubbed his hand up and down Angel's cold, slender arm, humming an agreement that was not quite a question, not quite a statement, but a prayer.

* * *

I woke up to soft beeping, scratchy sheets, and an overwhelming certainty that I was totally, all-encompassingly, and downright fucked.

My body moved on autopilot. Instantly, I flailed into a defensive seated position, panicking further when I felt wires attached to my chest and the definitive prick of an IV in my arm. My hand flew to the site and ripped at the dressing there. I felt like I couldn't breathe.

"Stop, stop, stop, _Max,_ stop—"

Fang. Fang's hands were at my sides, in my hair, cupping my cheeks. He moved his face directly in front of mine, centimeters away, and refused to blink. The bloodshot hue of his sclera contrasted starkly with Challenger-Deep blue of his irises. His face was flushed, heavy bags sat just over his cheekbones, and he looked deeply troubled.

 _Shit,_ I registered blankly. _He looks like shit._

"Hey. Look at me. Breathe. You're safe. You're _safe_. Everything is under control. I have _everything_ under control. I need you to relax."

A brief moment passed in which I considered listening to him—he was Fang, after all, and if he was handling the situation, then I'd be okay—but a split second later, monitors started screaming all around us and I threw myself toward the side of the bed. I felt something tear on my left side, near my armpit.

 _Where am I? How did I get here? What's going—_

There was a flurry of movement and then Angel was next to me, looking even more exhausted than Fang. An influx of calm thoughts tried to penetrate the panic but dissipated like wisps of smoke. "I can only do so much, Fang," she said nervously, "there's so many of them, I can't brainwash all of them at once—"

"You're doing great, Ange—just keep it up a little bit longer—Jesus, Max, you already ripped your stitches—" Fang's gentle hands were pushing me back to the side of the bed. Nausea rolled over me like a thundercloud and I gagged. An emesis basin was thrust into my hands and I retched into it miserably.

The monitors had quieted down back to that muffled _blip, blip, blip_ that I could only assume was my heart rate. My head was throbbing, and I could not piece together the information that had landed me here.

I decided to go with what typically landed me up the creek: my own stupidity.

"I'm sorry," I gasped, pressing a hand to my forehead. He shook his head, but I needed to get the words out, needed him to know how sorry I was. "Fang—"

I had subconsciously reached a hand out to him and he grabbed it, tightly.

"I didn't have a choice this time." His voice shook when he spoke. "We thought you were bleeding internally—you weren't making any sense, you kept throwing up, you were losing all this blood from the bullet wound... They did imaging once we got you here and it's just a pretty serious concussion, but..."

Fang finished with an odd sort of grunt and Angel's head swiveled at him, eyes wide with concern. She turned to look at the door again, no doubt focusing her energy on keeping everyone's attention away from my room, but one of her hands found his shoulder.

While Fang had shown a whole new spectrum of emotions over the past few weeks, he had not shown whatever this one was.

Fang composed himself quickly and held my gaze, raking a hand through his messy hair repeatedly. It stood like overgrown, jet-black grass atop his head. "We've been through a lot," he said quietly, tiredly, "But that was the most afraid I've ever been."

"They said it presented exactly like a brain bleed," Angel added. She looked about a hundred years old. "Which would've killed you. They said this could've, too. You had a seizure after we got you here. They gave you some medication to help with the swelling, and they have a different pill they want you to take for the next week. You're also on some pretty heavy pain medications." She held up a little baggie in her right hand, evidently full of medications that she'd probably swiped from the nurse's station. They were all different sizes and colors.

Angel, reading my mind, attempted a reassuring smile and rattled off a couple of gibberish-sounding words that I assumed were names of medications. "Got it covered."

My brain was still swirling so wildly that I wasn't sure which way was up. I wasn't sure if it was from the narcotics, the concussion, the panic, or some fantastic goulash of all three.

"Need to pee," I said shamelessly. My head was so heavy but the rest of me was feather-light. I felt dangerously close to a hallucination.

"That's from the medication," Fang said. "You have a catheter in. So just go."

I didn't have the capacity to be mortified. "Need to get out of here."

Angel and Fang shared a significant gaze. I opened my mouth to ask about it, but Angel sighed and started talking. "You really should stay here for a few days, even with our healing. But…"

"But Angel picked the brains of the doctors, and between her and Iggy you'll probably be safer recovering somewhere else," Fang finished. He brushed a stray hair out of my eyes. "Where you can lay low."

I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing—in, out, in, out. _They found you in the forests of Massachusetts,_ I thought. In, out. _They found you in Death Valley._ In, out. _They'll find you in this hospital._ In, out. _Need to keep moving._

"Let's go," I said simply.

* * *

After a lengthy process of Angel summoning her favorite brainwashed nurse and instructing her to remove my catheter and IV and do some in-depth discharge teaching, we were trying to inconspicuously travel down the halls of the hospital, Angel projecting the most potent mind-clearing thoughts she could manage as Fang rolled my wheelchair behind her.

"Almost there, Ange," he said under his breath. "You kicked ass today."

"I feel like I need to sleep for the next week," she mumbled. I barely had enough energy to grunt in agreement.

Our trip out of the huge medical center was mostly silent. Angel was nursing a slightly bleeding nose and what I imagined was a skull-splitting headache, and though I knew he wanted to comfort me, Fang was certainly battling the overwhelming smells that came with being in a hospital. No amount of assimilation into society could remove that knee-jerk reaction.

I could feel the emotions I should've been feeling washing over me, horrified embarrassment, panic, confusion; but nothing could penetrate my drug-induced haze. Fang had one hand firmly on my shoulder as he steered the wheelchair with the other.

"Everyone is outside," Angel said from ahead of us. The hallway stretched beyond her endlessly. "I told them we're leaving."

I grimaced as a stretcher clanged by. "How long…?"

"Two days," Fang said tiredly. It was about what I'd guessed based on the bags under his eyes.

I groaned in response anyway.

"We didn't have a choice, Max. Everything is fine," Fang said. "Don't worry."

"It wouldn't have been safe to move you," said Angel.

We emerged from the hospital to greet a thankfully dreary day, although the muddy light still gave me a crippling migraine. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, Nudge was in front of me, shoving a giant pair of sunglasses on my face before throwing herself a bit violently at me.

"Easy, Nudge," Fang said.

To her credit, Nudge dialed it back about half a notch. But instead of her typical Nudge channel, hyperactive bubbliness, I was encompassed by a very different girl. A more somber one.

For a long time, she said nothing. Then, delicately: "I was so scared. Thank God you're okay."

"We gotta go," Iggy said. "Fang, can you drive the getaway car?"

Fang braked the wheelchair and walked around to face me. "Can you walk?"

I nodded vigorously and stood…

…and then promptly lost my balance and pitched forward.

Fang grabbed my shoulders, but it was Iggy who wrapped his arm around me and essentially dragged my weight to the van as Fang clambered into the driver's seat.

"Glad to have you back," Iggy said from his spot next to me in the back seat. I could hear the emotion locked behind those words. "Half-conscious again, I see."

 _Bite me,_ I thought, but the words never made it to my lips—Fang started the car and I was gone, gone, gone.

* * *

The next day was Thanksgiving, and we spent it in a motel in Wyoming. Not quite as glamorous as the Venetian, but the fact of the matter was that Angel had been far too exhausted to work the muscles of her mind any further—I was told later that Iggy had essentially half-carried her (while Fang carried me) through the lobby while the Gasman tried to distract the staff from what was certainly the most suspicious group of people to have ever entered the building.

To be honest, I don't remember much about that stretch of days. I remember being fed mashed potatoes and finely sliced pieces of turkey while I rested in a musty bed. I remember laying on the poorly upholstered couch with my bandaged head in Fang's lap while a cheesy, made-for-TV movie played. I remember participating meaningfully in conversations, albeit quiet, short-phrased ones.

I remember being told Mallory was dead, and so was Charlie.

As I got clearer, I was informed the decision had been made to camp out at the motel for at least a full week to allow me to heal, much to my chagrin. Finances weren't an issue—yet. But soon enough, we'd be a band of mutants on the run again, at least for a little while.

On my first fully lucid day, I pulled Fang and Iggy into the bedroom, closing the door behind me.

It had been a couple of days, so my finely-tuned sense of sarcasm and untamable stubbornness was back in full swing.

"I am _more_ than capable of sleeping in a cave right now," I said to Fang and Iggy tightly. My strength was still poor, so I perched on the edge of the bed, frustrated as all hell, and stared up at their composed expressions.

"Mhm," said Iggy, nodding in an obviously facetious way. Fang said nothing.

"I'm still the leader around here!" I fumed, trying to mask the fact that every time I spoke, a lightning bolt shot from my bandaged left temple across to my right.

Fang, of course, picked up on this immediately.

"You can't even look at a lamp without wincing."

I bit back a scream of annoyance. "That doesn't make me an invalid!"

Iggy had a look of extreme sincerity on his face, but his voice was sarcastic. "All great points."

"Don't fuck with me," I warned.

Fang sat next to me on the bed, placing a giant hand on my bouncing knee. "Doesn't make you an invalid. But it means you deserve—and _need—_ a couple more days of recuperation." When I opened my mouth to protest, he said, "In a _real_ bed."

My eyes trailed to the window, where a few inches of snow had already accumulated on the sill outside. December had announced itself with a storm.

"Do you really think it's all over?" I asked in a tiny voice, hating how weak I sounded.

Iggy knelt in front of me, took my hands in his own. He raised his eyes to try to meet mine, though his gaze ended up somewhere over my right eyebrow. "Yeah," he said with a half-smile. "I do. But until we're certain, we still need to play it safe. Which means keeping all of us _alive,_ especially the concussed, Swiss-cheese-bullet-holed one of us."

My hand found the bandage at my left temple as I flinched. Iggy breathed a huge sigh, bowing his head.

"I'm never going to win this argument, am I?"

Fang shook his head, face stony.

"Okay," I said, pushing myself up from the bed. I slowly made my way to the door, ignoring the screaming pain in my side where the bullet had gotten me. "What's for dinner, then?"

* * *

The motel only had a small kitchenette with a hot plate, a toaster oven, and a mini fridge, so it took Iggy an hour or so to put together a mutant-sized dinner of spaghetti and meatballs.

As we ate, I grilled the flock about what had happened in Oak Creek. Earlier in my recovery, they had refused to tell me the details of the escape. No one said it, but I knew Fang and Iggy had deemed me too _fragile_ to be able to handle it, and that's why everyone was tight-lipped.

Now, though, five days later, I was ready to start throwing punches if they continued to hold out on me.

"I deserve to know what happened," I said, smearing some butter on a piece of garlic bread. "Stop babying me."

Directly across the table, Fang's jaw was tight as he scrutinized me. "What do you remember?" he asked finally.

"Everything is clear up until he kicked me, and then most of it is jumbled," I admitted. "I remember getting shot. I remember not feeling anything, and… then I felt _everything._ "

Iggy's mouth was set in a pale, thin line. "That's probably when you started screaming."

My stomach started to twist. "Jeb gave me something," I remembered. "A note or something. It had my name on it."

Iggy stopped chewing. "You _remember_ that?"

"What did it say?"

Nobody said anything.

Finally, Iggy, looking guilty, spoke lowly. "It got lost in the shuffle. I'm sorry, Max."

"Nobody _read_ it?"

"We were a _little_ preoccupied."

Gazzy was scooping a third helping onto his plate. "Who cares what that scumbag had to say? Good riddance."

Suddenly, I remembered what Mallory had said back in Oak Creek, when it was just he and I. "Mallory said Jeb was just a useless pawn," I blurted.

Silence.

" _Whaaaaat_?" said Nudge.

"Back in Colorado—I completely forgot," I said. I pushed my plate away, suddenly not hungry anymore. The pasta sat heavy in my stomach. "He said Jeb was a useless pawn and said everyone who worked for him knew I was his."

Five pairs of shocked eyes stared back at me.

Fang's knuckles were white where he gripped his fork, muscles of his face impossibly terse as he chewed methodically. Without meeting my gaze, he turned to Iggy, who seemed to know Fang was staring at him.

"And the plot thickens," Gazzy sighed miserably.

"Does it really matter who was in charge, at this point?" Angel said after swallowing her bite. She still looked lifeless from the forty-eight hours of mindbending she'd done back at the hospital. "All of them are dead anyway."

Gazzy met my eyes. " _Really,_ this time. We made sure of it."

"How did we get out of there?"

"We got you back to the van and Emily was gone. No trace of her anywhere. Must've fled on foot," Iggy said, scowling.

My mind clicked into overdrive despite its inability to make meaningful connections. "Why?" was all I could manage.

Fang's face was locked in a grimace. "We were never supposed to come back. She was waiting for Charlie."

"There's no question anymore about that chip in your arm," Nudge said quietly, looking utterly defeated. "I hacked their system. They were tracking you the whole time."

Realization washed over me like a terrible, traitorous wave. "Charlie brought us there to be captured." I paused, waiting for someone to tell me I was wrong. Nobody did.

He'd been a bad guy _the entire time._

"No," I breathed.

"I can't believe it still surprises us when people turn out to be fucking traitors," Gazzy muttered.

 _Oh, my God, they aren't kidding_ , I thought.

Iggy looked exhausted from his place on the couch. "Think about it. He was desperate to get his family out of that place. Just decided to take the most selfish route possible," he said.

"Then why did he try to help _me_ get out?"

"By letting us do the hard part," said Angel. " _We're_ the ones that blew EU up. _We're_ the ones who rescued his family. It was one big, stupid—"

" _Convincing_ ," Gazzy mumbled furiously.

"— _convincing_ act."

I don't know why I so desperately needed this betrayal to be untrue; it made me feel sick.

"You said you read their minds," I said to Angel. "That they were good guys."

Angel looked almost guilty. "I couldn't read Charlie's thoughts, because of his mutations. But Emily… either she had no idea, or she was _really_ good at changing her thoughts."

"I think she was out of the loop," Nudge said thoughtfully. "I bet he told her that if we came back without him, she should run. Maybe she was hiding."

"Charlie said he's the one who got me out the first time," I said, still grasping at straws. "He—"

"—lied," Fang finished softly. He still looked furious. "He lied, Max."

In my concussed haze, I felt tears prick the corners of my eyes. Not because I was sad about the death of Charlie, not because he specifically had lied. It was more an immense grief over the circumstances of my life, _our_ lives. No one was good. No one was kind. We had each other. That was all. And every time we forgot that, it was like shooting ourselves in the foot.

Fang's hand enveloped mine from across the table, breaking me from my reverie. "It's all over. We're free," he said softly, with the whisper of a grin on his lips. " _You're_ free."

* * *

"Older Chests" – Damien Rice

Just an epilogue left, folks! Thanks so much for enjoying this journey with me.


	26. Twenty-Six

_A/N: My short, concise epilogue turned into a novella in and of itself. I'm not even sure what happened—I've had a lot of this outlined forever, but I think I got a bit carried away with nostalgia… I just really didn't want to let this story go, and the characters had a lot more they wanted to say. As a result, instead of one twenty-page epilogue, I have split it into two shorter, final chapters. They are kind of sloppy and not the very best thing I've ever written in terms of my command of the English language, but it's a conclusion nonetheless._

* * *

 _I found myself that day, there was no other way  
I'd spent some time away, I'd never be the same  
I finally was awake, like water to my face  
I'd finally found my place; I'd never be the same_

* * *

TWENTY-SIX

Ever spent Christmastime in Montana? No? Well, neither had I, which I guess isn't much of a shocker, since it's a lifetime of firsts for me. Let me just say to all you Montanans—Montanists—Montanese—you sure have perfected the art of wintertime. I've never seen so much snow in my life. Or so many bobcats, or black bears, or those angry looking sheep with the giant, curly horns. Not that I go searching for any of these things, but still something to note.

After our brief stint in Wyoming for Thanksgiving, we decided to relocate somewhere even more isolated with lots of wide, open skies. And, what do you know, Montana's got its very own place called "Big Sky." Go figure. I guess its settlers were sick of coming up with original names and went with the first thing they saw.

To their credit, it _is_ hard to ignore. Everywhere you look, there it is: full of cirrocumulus clouds on the coldest of days, cumulonimbus during a blizzard, or as blue as Angel's eyes on a sunny day.

At any rate, we settled a bit east of Big Sky, in a washed-out town—really more like a village—in a run-down, rented condo until we could figure out a more permanent living situation.

Birds were everywhere out here, appropriately so for a place named after its expansive horizon, and it made us feel weirdly at home. Ferruginous hawks, the kind we'd befriended at Lake Mead, were everywhere, beautiful and powerful.

A group of ravens (Fang informed me that, hilariously, that the scientific term is not a flock but a "conspiracy" or an "unkindness" of ravens) lived in the tree closest to our place. I'd never admit it, but I took comfort in their blue-black wingspans, the majestic way they flew. I'm sure you could never guess why.

Unfortunately, a pair of loggerhead shrikes _also_ lived nearby, so we had the misfortune of discovering different tableaus of their prey, impaled on thorns, pointy branches, and essentially anything sharp enough to break the skin of whatever was for dinner. It was brutal, even I can agree—Nudge, with her somehow still pure heart, cried every time she saw the carcass of a lizard, chipmunk, or even a small bird picked clean on the end of whatever they'd been speared on—but they reminded me of us, the flock, in a macabre way: small, vicious underdogs, tackling the bigger enemy, doing whatever they needed to get their next meal.

With everyone chasing after us dead, we probably could've reclaimed our old identities. But I wasn't in the mood to test fate, and the rest of the flock seemed to agree, so we got to go through the fabulous process of selecting totally new names.

Our surname would be Anthony. As in Susan B., because of her part in the women's suffrage movement and the fact that she was a total badass. And because I was in charge, so I could choose whatever name I wanted.

I had chosen Mackenzie, because it was the closest I could get without being too conspicuous. Plus, I could still realistically go by _Max,_ with the hope that everyone would assume it was _Macks_.

Iggy had picked Joseph for the same reason—it was similar to Jeff, making it easier to slip back into that alter ego.

The Gasman was trying his hardest to convince me to let him go by "Anthony." And while I was all for the flock naming themselves, I would not have a little brother named Anthony Anthony, even if it was only as an alias, really more on principle than anything else.

"Come on," he whined. "I thought this wasn't a Maxocracy anymore."

"When you're being a twerp it is. These names are _only_ for our paperwork, which is _only_ for school or work or whatever. It is _not_ that hard to choose something less obnoxious. Do you really think our _parents_ , selflessly doing the Lord's work, would name their child something like that?"

"I think our _parents_ sold us to some _whacked out lab_ and couldn't care _less_ what my name is."

"Help me out here, Iggy?" Gazzy begged.

"Nope."

" _Fang?_ "

"She's the boss."

"Fine!" Gazzy muttered. It was good to see him acting like a teenager again—I was so sick of him walking on eggshells around me, thinking I was wounded. "Then I'm doing Zephyr again."

"How many Zephyrs do you think there are in the United States? If another one just happens to pop up, it could be suspicious. We don't know if Anne's still out there."

"At the very least, she's got to be _wicked_ unemployed," said Nudge, who was very domestically mixing up the batter for what smelled like snickerdoodles. "I pick Cleopatra."

I smiled, remembering her wearing that gold blouse and chattering away with the BioLife secretary. "I think that's perfect, Nudge."

"I want to be Cosette," Angel said. "Like from _Les Mis_."

Nudge frowned. "Doesn't everyone die in _Les Mis_?"

"Not Cosette," Angel said proudly.

"Have you been reading Victor Hugo again?" Iggy asked in an accusatory voice. Angel giggled.

The Gasman's confused face had been replaced by a diabolical one, and I braced myself for what was to come.

"Fine," he said proudly, corners of his mouth so high on his face that I thought they might split from his grin. "I choose Evel."

"As in Knievel?" asked Iggy. He held a hand up and Gazzy slapped him five. "Awesome."

"Fine with me," I said. Gazzy looked disappointed in my reaction. I shrugged. "Anything's better than Captain Terror."

He turned a brilliant shade of red. "Hey! I was _eight!_ "

I laughed. "And you've got the rest of your life to live it down, buddy. But not today."

"What about you, Fnick?" Iggy said with a grin. He elbowed Fang in the side, who'd been particularly quiet, even by his standards. "Got anything sneaky hidden up those pop-punk sleeves of yours?"

Fang wasted an exasperated look on Iggy. "Hadn't thought about it," he said with a shrug. "Mike?"

" _Mike?_ " Iggy and Gazzy said incredulously.

After a moment, Fang smiled with his eyes. "What's wrong with Mike?"

Angel laughed. "You don't exactly come off like a Mike, Fang."

"I'm open to suggestions."

"What about Luke?" said Nudge as she rolled the batter into balls and dropped them on the cookie sheet. "You know, like from _Gilmore Girls._ The sarcastic, protective, do-it-yourselfer. Wears a lot of flannel."

"Yeah, and then we can call you Fluke instead of Fnick!" Gazzy said brightly.

Fang was collecting Nudge's dirty dishes as she worked and washing them in the sink. "Fluke it is, Figgy."

Christmas Day was nothing short of overwhelming, if I'm being honest. It was my first Christmas in a place I called _home_ since I was fourteen. And it was the flock's first Christmas with me back.

Iggy, forever our personal treasurer, dished out a hundred dollars to each of us to buy gifts with. When I tried to protest, he laughed. "Max. I've been handling the money for five years. Also—come on. This is a year to celebrate," he said. "Live a little."

Even I couldn't argue with that logic.

For Angel, I decided on a simple charm bracelet. I let the rest of the flock in on this purchase and they each selected their own charm for her. I decided on one shaped like the sun with a single word on it: _free._

Gazzy wasn't as simple as I'd predicted—the kid loved so many things that I couldn't even decide where to start. His boots were looking a bit worn, though, so I scavenged at a couple of thrift stores and found a barely-worn pair of tactical boots for $30. They were two sizes too big, but at the rate he was growing, he'd only have to stuff socks in the toes for a couple of months before they'd hopefully fit him for a long while. It was horrifyingly wasteful (but fantastically convenient) to me that someone had donated them—they were in near-perfect condition.

I got Nudge a pair of feathery earrings that stopped me in my tracks as I went by the handmade jewelry kiosk in the nearby mall. They resembled her primaries so closely it nearly took my breath away. When the woman who'd made them told me they were feathers from the molting pheasants that lived in her backyard, I was sold. We were fairly certain Nudge's two percent bird DNA was from some kind of pheasant.

She smiled as she rang me up. "Perfect for someone you know?"

"You have no idea," I'd said back.

Just when I thought I'd never find anything for Iggy, I stumbled across it at a department store—a watch with a raised face, and a sturdy one at that. _For the visually impaired,_ the box said. How we'd never thought of this before, I'd never know. While the rest of us knew how to determine the time roughly by the sun, Iggy was totally reliant on us. He would never admit it, but I knew it would give him a small piece of independence.

The hardest was, of course, Fang. What to give him? The guy who asked nothing of anybody, who kept us all together?

I finally decided on a fancy pocket knife after convincing Iggy to slip me another couple of bills.

"And here I was thinking we were all _equal,_ " Iggy quipped.

My heart dropped in an interesting mixture of guilt and annoyance. "Ig—""

But Iggy busted into a toothy grin he'd undoubtedly been holding back. "For the love of God, Max," he said, shaking his head. He handed me another fifty. "Here."

My cheeks burnt with embarrassment. Before I could thank my lucky stars that Iggy was blind, he was chortling and shaking his head. "You crazy kids."

* * *

The night of Christmas Eve, I flew out to one of the higher peaks in Big Sky in as many layers as I could move in. It was actually a mild night, as far as late-December Montana went, and the icy air added a sense of clarity. I was feeling pensive.

I pulled up my hood and flopped backward, staring up at the impossibly clear sky. No city lights to distract from the beauty of the stars, no highways to shatter the perfect silence. I watched my breath twist above me and disappear into the atmosphere.

We'd decided to lay low here until New Years Day. From then we'd circle back to the old house in Massachusetts, try to sell it (or whatever was left of it, if Mallory and his men had managed to destroy it), and find a more permanent living situation to assume our new identities in.

And now it was Christmas. One more week of relaxation, one more week of endless horizons and snow and hawks and ravens and _this_ , before we started over yet again.

I felt an immense sense of guilt over it, mostly when I thought of Nudge, who'd always wanted nothing more than to settle down and enjoy as normal of a life as possible. And I'd ruined that by crash-landing in their backyard and bringing all my baggage with me.

A branch snapped somewhere behind me and I was on my feet in a defensive crouch in seconds flat. A figure emerged from one of the giant pines and I let out the breath I'd been holding.

I pressed a hand over my heart in a feeble attempt to stop it from hammering. "Jesus, Fang."

"Sorry. Took me a little while to find you. Lots of mountains. Harder to track you when you smell so clean."

"Yeah, well, I wasn't really looking to be _found._ " It was irrational, but I was totally peeved he'd startled me the way he had.

"I thought we could do this now," he said, ignoring me, and produced a small cardboard box from his pocket. "I mean, it's basically Christmas already."

I stared at it dumbly, startled out of my bad mood. "What?"

"Gifts." He produced another box wrapped in silver paper. This one I recognized—it was my gift for him.

"I knew you'd refuse to open your gift unless I opened mine, too." He handed me the cardboard box and indicated that I open it. "Age before beauty."

Too tired to argue, I pulled the top off and inspected my gift. In the middle of a loop of leather, a diamond-shaped piece of metal was threaded around a cylindrical-shaped bit of flint to form a two-part pendant. It wasn't flashy, it wasn't gaudy, but it was _me_ , as far as jewelry went. And it was practical—I immediately recognized what it was.

"A firestarter," I said in wonder. "Where the hell did you find something like this?"

Fang said nothing, looking, of all things, concerned—as if I may not like it—as I ogled it. It had been a long time since I'd received a gift, but I had certainly never gotten one this thoughtful.

After a minute or so of this, Fang pulled the box from my hands and removed the piece delicately. "Around."

" _Around?_ " I motioned to the mountains, the sky. "There's not exactly much _around,_ Fang."

He ignored me. "You're not one for jewelry, but I still wanted to get you something. So I thought if it was something practical, maybe you'd have to…"

But he didn't finish his thought. He adjusted the two slipknots on the leather, so it was wide enough to fit over my head. He pulled my hair out of the way, breath tickling my spine and making me shudder, before he slipped it around my neck and tightened it to an acceptable length.

"I know you're more than capable of starting a fire from scratch," he added, almost as a disclaimer. "But a little help couldn't hurt."

"Yeah," I said thickly, fingering the pendant around my neck. I felt tears sting the corners of my eyes and willed them not to fall. I was at a complete loss for words.

It was perfect. He knew me so well and had picked this gift so carefully—what was I supposed to say?

I opened my mouth to thank him but what came out was "I'm sorry" in this horrifying sort of half-sob.

Fang's eyes flashed with confusion. " _Sorry_?"

When I shook my head, the tears fell. I wiped them away quickly and puffed out a sigh, trying to control my shaky voice. "For everything. It's been a crazy couple of months, and I dragged you all into this mess and…"

Fang advanced on me and cupped my face in his hands, eyes hardening as he stared into mine. "Stop."

"What?"

"Don't you dare apologize," he said. "You're being ridiculous. Your fight is our fight. We're a family. We go to the ends of the earth for each other, no matter what the cost."

He was looking at me like he was searching for some secret behind my eyes. I swallowed the rest of my tears.

"Just because they did what they did to you doesn't make it your fault," he said quietly. "None of it was your fault. You know that, right?"

He was right, obviously. I hadn't asked for any of this or planned it in advance. The crippling PTSD that life had given me was unavoidable. I'd done everything in my power to protect the flock, to fight, to survive.

So why did I feel so _guilty?_

Of course, Fang could read my mind effortlessly. He brushed his thumbs over my cheekbones as he chewed over what he wanted to say, looking ready to blurt out a speech, but at the last minute, he decided on, "You're fine." Then, pulling his hands back and shooting me one of his crooked Fang smiles: "Do I get to see what was on your sleigh for me?"

A laughed at his sudden change in tune, handing him the small, silver box. "Go ahead."

He inspected all six faces of the gift with mock sincerity. "You've been holding out on us," he said, gesturing to the wrapping paper and the bow on the top.

"Yeah. Wait til you see me with a sewing machine. EU turned me into quite the homemaker." I snorted. "The lady insisted I let her wrap it. Who am I to crush her dreams?"

Fang's lithe fingers delicately unwrapped the package. "This had better be Tiffany."

I rolled my eyes. "Spare me."

He opened the box and pulled out the pocketknife. When he said nothing, I panicked.

"It's stupid," I said quickly. "But I thought it could be practical and also…" I searched for a word that did not come before plunging on. "The handle is real blue spruce, just like the trees we used to watch the sunrise in near the E house in Colorado."

Fang ran his thumb over the inscription on one side. I couldn't see his expression and got even more nervous.

"Those are the coordinates for the cave at Lake Mead. I just figured—you know—we've got some… memories there." I thought of the hawks, the desert rat, and, blushing, the morning Fang and I had spent there on the cliff face. "And I wanted it to be special. One-of-a-kind."

He turned it over to look at the other side, where Nudge had carefully carved a raven's wingspan into the wood. I'd thought of attempting it myself but decided I'd totally botch it and would probably benefit from some help from the only artist among us. She'd done an impeccable job—they looked exactly like Fang's wings.

By now, I was just jabbering nervously, trying to fill the pregnant silence with anything at all. "Those are raven's wings," I mumbled. "I don't think I ever realized just how much yours resembled them until we found the ones in the tree out back. And I figured it's a part of you, you know, and no matter how fucked up or terrible or insane this life has been, it's who we are, and—""

I was cut off by Fang advancing on me in two quick steps. Without hesitating, he dipped to kiss me. Not in a hungry, yearning way, but like I was the most important thing in his life, in the world.

Like he loved me.

He pulled away, leaving his hand tangled in my hair, and smiled in a way I'd never seen him smile.

"Thank you," he said. Then he wrapped me in his arms as the snowflakes, pure and delicate, started to fall.

* * *

Hours later, a strangled cry woke me from a deep, deep sleep, and I opened my eyes to see Fang shooting up in bed next to me. " _Max?_ " Fang thundered. His voice was panicked, his eyes glazed over as they wildly searched the room. "Max!"

I was half-conscious but on high alert. "I'm here," I croaked, sitting up next to him. I blinked the sleep out of my eyes and grabbed his arm, which was coated in sweat and trembling. A quick sweep of the room indicated that everything was fine, that he'd just had a bad dream. His bare torso glimmered with a sheen of sweat. "I'm right here—it was just a dream, everything's okay."

The door slammed open and Iggy barreled through, wearing only boxers and a terrified look. The rest of the flock was hot on his heels. "What's going on? Is she okay?"

In lieu of an answer, Fang desperately said my name over and over.

"Right here," I repeated. "I'm okay, everything's okay."

Fang's hands found my face, cupping my cheeks tightly, staring at me with wild, frenzied eyes.

"You're alive," he gasped. "Tell me you're real. _Tell me you're real._ "

"I'm alive." I gripped his forearms and pulled his hands from my cheeks so I could grip them tightly. My heart was racing and I was still shaking off the coma-like state I'd been in. I'd never seen him like this; it was terrifying. "Fang. I'm alive."

"Fang, it's okay," Angel said from the end of the bed. Her eyes were huge, and she looked hesitant to approach further.

When Fang didn't break out of his trance, I placed one of his hands over my heart and held it there. With my other hand, I grabbed the back of his head and forced his forehead to mine, noses touching, breath mingling in the inches between us.

"I'm real. All of this is real. Everything is fine."

He looked completely unconvinced. "We lost you." His eyes said, _I lost you_.

I put together a mantra, an explanation that would force his calculating mind to recognize that he was not, in fact, dreaming. It would soon become a sermon of sorts that I'd repeat to him every single time he had this dream for years to come.

"That was a dream. It wasn't real. I'm alive. We're all alive. It's over. We won now we're all together and everything…" I forced the lie between my lips: "Everything is okay."

Fang slumped slightly into me. He shut his eyes for a minute or so and then opened them with a heavy sigh, still looking totally shaken.

Despite the past few months of our lives, and the almost five years the five of them had endured during my capture, this was unlike any other crack in Fang's armor. Because this was fear from within him; this was the thing that haunted him from his subconscious. An intangible possibility spawned from the depths of his mind.

This was a nightmare.

"Let's go for a fly, guys," I heard Iggy suggest softly to the flock. They slinked out of the room one by one, leaving just Fang and I leaning against the headboard, still forehead-to-forehead in the darkness.

Wordlessly, Fang wrapped an arm around my shoulder. I pulled him tightly into me, forcing our foreheads together again.

"Okay?" I asked softly. I scratched the back of his head with one of my hands, running my fingers through the curls and knots, smiling when his eyes fluttered shut at my touch. "Just a dream," I reminded him again.

He nodded against my forehead. His breaths were coming in gasps, as if he was trying to keep himself from completely losing it.

A few more moments passed, just the two of us clinging to each other as if our lives depended on it. When his eyes opened, I was not prepared for the emotions I found there. Pain. Hope. Sorrow. _Love_.

Making one of my infamous snap decisions, I slammed my lips against his.

After a moment of shock, Fang's strong hands found my waist, then my back, then fisted themselves in my hair. I groaned when his tongue prodded my lips questioningly. There was that live-wire, tingles-in-my-bones feeling I'd only ever experienced back on that cliff face, what seemed like lifetimes ago. But this time felt different—it felt new, it felt pure. And I knew that no bad memories would plague me like they had last time.

Rather than letting him kiss me, I dragged my mouth to his jaw, making my way down his neck to his clavicle. A moan grumbled from low in his chest as I made my way back up, planting a kiss at the corner of his mouth before smiling at him.

He tapped my temple. "What's going on in there?"

I sighed shakily and shook my head. "All I'm certain of is that I never want you to leave my side again," I whispered. "Ever."

"I almost lost you," he said in a thick voice, trying and failing to mask the emotions he was feeling.

I shrugged and offered him a shy smile. "But you didn't. I'm right here."

I rose to my knees and settled back on my heels across from him. I ran a hand through his bed hair.

Fang kissed me again, more tenderly this time. His lips, warm and soft, moved gently against mine. One of his hands found my waist again and then slipped and brushed the top of my thigh. He retreated immediately, murmuring an apology against my lips, but I grabbed his hand and moved it back, coaxing a groan from somewhere deep in him.

"Fang," I breathed, and then his powerful hands were lifting me onto his lap. His mouth drew a pathetic sound from me and he laughed against my lips, no doubt proud that he could reduce the great Maximum Ride to a whimpering puddle of goo.

His hands were flames, first tracing and then grabbing my curves and my corners, then inching them inward again toward the crease where my belly met my leg. I felt him, hard, warm, wanting, against me, impossibly close but entirely too far. His mouth made its way to the valley between my breasts, a place no foreign hands had ever touched, and the reaction was immediate: a moan burst through my lips. My body writhed against him, shivering with yearning in an intricate dance, blood singing a beautiful symphony, and his hand found the waistband of my panties and—

Fang froze and pulled away with robotic precision. The heat between us did not yield as he tried to focus, tried to breathe. I could see him grappling with whatever control he had left.

"What?" I gasped. "What happened?"

"Max, we can't," he said huskily, licking his lips.

I narrowed my eyes and planted my hands on my hips, very aware of how nearly naked we were in our current position. We'd gotten this far, and he was going to hit me with _this?_ " _Excuse_ me?"

"Last time we did this…"

I grabbed his chin with one hand, looking him straight in the eyes. "You are _you._ Fang. My best friend. The only person I trust implicitly. Mallory is dead. You would never hurt me. You know that. _I_ know that. I'm not the girl I was a month ago. I want this," I said seriously. Then, voice raspy from swallowing a lump in my throat: "I want _you_."

And then, in a flash, I was on my back on the bed, and Fang was hovering inches over me, looking so full of desire, of passion, of _caring_ that it nearly reduced me to tears.

"You'll tell me to stop?"

I made a sort of choking sound, partway between a laugh and a snort and something else entirely. As if at any point I was going to want him to stop. But if it made him feel better: "Yes."

"You're sure?" he said in a throaty voice that made lighting shoot through to my toes.

I leaned up to kiss his cheek. "I love you," I answered.

Fang's eyes were brighter than I'd ever seen them, a sort of warm, glowing color—like the first sliver of blue against the ebony night as the sun starts to rise. A new day. A new beginning. Starting now.

Rather than kissing me again, though, he lowered himself down on one elbow. His other hand found my face, tracing a line from my hairline down my jaw to my lips, where he rubbed a thumb over them. His face was guarded still.

My eyebrows furrowed as I spoke, trying to withhold my frustration. "What?" It barely even qualified as a whisper—just a tendril of air, one syllable; a loaded question.

Fang shook his head, looking down so he could dodge my questioning eyes. I raised a hand and tipped his chin up with a finger. A single tear pooled in the corner of one eye and threatened to fall. I wiped it away with the pad of my thumb.

"It's _okay_ ," I said gently. "I'm not afraid of you, Fang. What do I need to say to make you believe me?"

Fang shook his head. "That's not it."

"Then what? Talk to me."

"I dreamed of this," he said, offering a half-laugh. "You and me, like this. For years. You have no idea how long I've waited. Part of me thought it would never happen. But at least I had you in my life. And then... you were gone. I held out hope for a while, but eventually I had to let go. It was destroying me. There was no me and you. No… _this,_ " he said, gesturing vaguely toward where our bodies nearly touched from head to toe. "Not even in my dreams. Because you weren't ever coming back."

"But I did come back. Here I am. And it's all over," I said. "You have me. All of me. We're safe. And I'm never letting you out of my sight again."

Fang nodded.

"Now get _down_ here," I ordered with a coy smile, pulling him toward me with as much strength as I could muster.

His eyes lit with a mischievous fire and he kissed me again, possessively, protectively. His hand dipped below my underwear, eyes asking a million unspoken questions, and I said, " _Please._ "

When he smiled, I swear, it lit up the entire room.

And I threw my head back and, for the first time in years, I felt _alive._

* * *

A/N: The last chapter is written, folks! Reviews may motivate me to post it faster :) Also - I posted a one-shot called _Daybreak_ that I think you might like, if you haven't checked it out yet.


	27. Twenty-Seven

_A/N: Please enjoy this final installment of In the Woods Somewhere, and I'll catch you at the A/N at the end._

* * *

 _I clutched my life and wished it kept  
My dearest love, I'm not done yet  
How many years I know I'll bear  
I found something in the woods somewhere_

* * *

TWENTY-SEVEN

Christmas morning was such a smooth affair that I almost felt normal. _Almost._

With the gifts all opened and the breakfast feast Iggy prepared devoured, we spent most of the day lounging around and enjoying each other's company.

Mid-afternoon, the Gasman slipped into one of the bedrooms. I started to follow him in but stopped when I saw the scene before me, instead settling for peering through the cracked door.

Iggy tiptoed up behind me and opened his mouth as if to say something. I elbowed him in the gut silently. He bit back an _oof._

There was a heavy sigh. Nudge was curled up on one of the horribly upholstered chairs in the corner of the room. She raked her hands over her eyes.

"What's up?" said the Gasman, sitting on the arm next to her.

"Nothing," Nudge answered quickly.

"Oh, really? Okay. I'll be going, then." Gazzy said sarcastically, rolling his eyes gently. "C'mon, Nudge. It doesn't take a genius to know you're upset."

"It's stupid."

"Can't be stupid if you're this upset about it."

My heart melted at how grown up Gazzy was when it came to his family.

Nudge offered a half-hearted laugh and tucked a stray, frizzy curl behind her ear. "We never really talked about it. Any of it, you know?"

"About what?"

"All of it. Max being back. What they did to her. And then they took you and Fang, too. And… all I kept thinking was that…" A tear dropped to the ground in front of them; I stifled the urge to run to her side and comfort her.

"It's okay," Gazzy said softly, and touched her forearm. "Everything's fine now."

Nudge's voice was shaking, now. "I kept thinking that… that if they were going to kill you, then you spent the last days of your life thinking I hated you."

Gazzy laughed, a strange sound now that his voice was deepening. Nudge snapped her head up, frowning severely. Gazzy held his hands up in a white flag gesture. "No, no!" he said, waving his arms. "No, it's just…" He shook his head as he chuckled. "I could never hate you. I love you."

Nudge's face turned to one of immense confusion as the Gasman realized what had come out of his mouth.

"I mean like, uh—everyone, you know." He coughed, looking very much like he wanted to play in traffic. "I love all of you, no matter what. We fight, yeah. Sometimes we want to never see each other again. But we're family. We know we love each other, and we're always there for each other, no matter what."

Nudge smiled and leaned her shoulder against his arm, letting out a sigh. "I guess you're right. I'm just glad we all made it out alive. Maybe we can finally start over. Have some peace."

There was a quick second of content silence; I could sense that Iggy was ready to explode at any minute.

"Everyone told me what you did," Gazzy finally said, looking down at Nudge. I couldn't see his expression behind his long, blond curls, but I suspected it was one of supreme embarrassment.

"What I did?"

"Y'know, when you saved me from EU the night we blew it up."

Nudge, bless her soul, was as blissfully unaware of Iggy and I in the hallway as she was of Gazzy's infatuation with her. She smiled again, a big one. "What are you thanking me for? Of course, Gaz," she laughed, leaning forward and ruffling his hair. "You're my little brother. I'd do anything for you."

Immediately, Gazzy's entire demeanor changed. Iggy hissed a low snicker and spoke so quietly that I had to strain to hear him. "Only thing worse than the friendzone: the _brother_ zone." I kicked him in the knee.

"Yeah," Gazzy said cooly, folding an arm up to scratch the back of his neck in an attempt to look casual. "Yeah, no, totally. Sis… ter. Sister. Big sis."

Nudge leaned into his side and gave him a hug. "We made it."

Gazzy visibly relaxed and wrapped an arm around her to rub her shoulder. "We did, didn't we?"

I grabbed Iggy by the arm and dragged him away. "Let them have their moment." I was shocked when he put up no argument.

So hours later, when he returned from the grocery store with an interestingly frosted cake, I was almost reassured by the familiarity I saw in my ginger-haired brother.

"You didn't," I said accusingly.

But he had.

Christmas dinner was not the customary honey-glazed ham but a fantastic rotisserie chicken Iggy had prepared. It reminded me a bit of our days on the run, which was actually kind of comforting. Angel had seasoned and roasted some asparagus and Nudge had whipped up some mashed potatoes.

At the end of the meal, Iggy sauntered out with the cake. He dropped it on the table with an unholy grin, winking viciously in the direction of the Gasman. "Just a holiday treat."

Nudge leaned forward and frowned as she read the icing. "'Maybe when you're older, big guy?'" she cocked her head to the side. "What the hell does that mean?"

Fang, who had heard the story of the unrequited love between the Gasman and Nudge from me, nearly choked on a stalk of asparagus. Angel, of course, could read our minds, so she kept her face low to her plate and giggled soundlessly. That left only Nudge out of the loop.

"It was on clearance," Iggy lied smoothly with a mischievous smile. "I decided any cake is better than no cake."

This was a satisfactory answer for Nudge, who thanked Iggy and dug in with gusto. By the end of dessert, Gazzy's face was redder than his Christmas sweater.

Once dinner was over, the younger kids took over the task of washing and putting away the dishes. Iggy advanced on where Fang and I were quietly discussing next moves.

"I have to show you something," he muttered under his breath. "Both of you."

We followed him into the bedroom. Iggy stood next to the window and faced us, heaving a sigh and looking very distressed.

"What is it?" I asked earnestly. "What's going on?"

There was a lengthy pause that felt like hours. Then:

"I have the note Jeb left you."

It took a minute, but my brain finally caught up to speed despite my inability to make sense of his words.

"No, it got left behind," I said, shaking my head. "In Oak Creek."

Iggy had the decency to look sheepish. Afraid, even. That's when I realized that my trust in him was misguided.

"You have it," I said dumbly.

Iggy nodded once, refusing to let his blind gaze fall anywhere near mine, a habit he still had from his days of sight.

He had the note. The one with the big, fancy _M_ that Jeb had tried to hand me with his dying breath. The one meant for me—maybe only me. Not that Iggy could read it, but he'd kept it secret for a month.

" _You kept this from me?_ "

It was a scream. Despite my anger issues, pigheadedness, and bossy tendencies, I had _never_ felt this angry, _never_ been this betrayed by a member of the flock before. Iggy had been sitting on this for a _month_ and had lied _directly_ to my face when asked about it.

"I decided—"

"You _decided?_ You _DECIDED?_ " I was shrieking. Beyond angry. Almost beyond words. "What happened to 'this isn't a Maxocracy anymore, Max?', and 'we make decisions as a flock, Max?'"

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry, I just thought—"

"And don't even _act_ like _he_ wasn't in on this!" I bellowed, pointing an accusatory finger at Fang.

Fang, to his credit, looked angry, too. "You think I would've kept something like this from you? I had no idea." His eyes flashed with hurt before he glowered at our tall, pale brother. "What the hell were you thinking?"

"You were in absolutely no condition to be under further stress," Iggy argued, looking at me. "You _still_ aren't—"

"Well, that's the way life works sometimes, Iggy! Sometimes, we have to deal with things we don't want to have to deal with! Stress is my life! Welcome to reality!"

"You almost died!"

My mouth immediately shut when Iggy's voice cracked with a sob. Across from me, his strawberry-blonde eyebrows folded, betraying the defensive stance he tried to maintain. Slowly, he unraveled his arms and dropped onto the edge of the bed, dumping his head in his hands. I could tell he was trying to mask the shaking of his shoulders, but I was far too angry to care.

"Welcome to reality?" he said brokenly through his hands. "The _reality_ is that you dodged death more times than I can count last month. And probably even _more_ than that in the five years before. Not to _mention_ the first fourteen years of our lives."

I didn't move. My mind was screaming _kill him_ but my heart wanted to crush him in my arms and never let go.

And _then_ kill him.

"Every single time something happened, I thought to myself, 'is this what's going to kill her?' The human body can take a beating, Max. We all know that. But you are so far beyond that point. You've had one long, chronic concussion since getting back to us. You're skin and bones. Your mind isn't in the right place—and rightfully so. What they did to you, on top of everything else that they did to you, did to _us,_ back at the School…"

Slowly, I made my way across the room to sit at Iggy's side. Fang stood in front of us, arms crossed, emotions protected by the indifference of his facial features.

"You needed a break, Max," Iggy continued, quieter now. "The whole time, my plan was to show you this on Christmas. To give you one month. One month of rest, physically and mentally. So you could heal. So you could eat. So you could laugh. So you could get back to _you._ Because the person who dropped into our yard that night was not you, and neither was the girl we dragged out of that fortress in Oak Creek last month."

That got me all riled up again.

"Maybe I'll never be _me_ again! Did you ever think of that, Iggy? That maybe I'm changed for good, that I'm broken? Don't you dare act like keeping this from me was some noble fucking sacrifice for the greater good!"

I sighed heavily and dropped my head back, studying the ugly stucco ceiling. My hand found Iggy's and squeezed it. It was clammy and cold.

"Iggy, I love you, but you _cannot_ do things like this. Keep things from me. I am never going to be who I was before all of this, and that's sad and it sucks and woe is me, whatever. But I _don't_ need to be protected. I _don't_ need to be babied. I what I _do_ need is to know what's going on. This is my life."

"It's our lives, too, Max! What happens to you has an impact on all of us. _Especially_ the kids. God, I swear, Nudge makes herself sick to the point of throwing up worrying about you. I couldn't tell you the number of times the Gasman has woken me up because he sneaks out of the room just to watch you breathe at night. Don't even get me started on him," he said, jerking his head toward Fang.

Fuming, I looked to Fang, waiting patiently for him to voice his solidarity with me.

Instead, what came out of his mouth was, "He's right."

My jaw dropped. _"What?"_

"He's right," he repeated, looking a bit conflicted. "You would never have healed like this if you were worried over whatever's on this stupid note."

"He doesn't even know what it says!" I shrieked. I eyed Fang desperately. "You can't be serious."

"I still think he's a moron, but he's right," Fang offered. "We made it through the last month. Whatever is written on that piece of paper doesn't change anything."

"Where is it?" I demanded lethally. This argument was going nowhere and nothing could be changed now—I would kill them both later. "For all we know, it's a letter telling me to go fuck myself."

Iggy barked a startled laugh. "Somehow, I doubt it." He fished in his pocket and produced the sheet of paper. "Here."

He pressed it into my trembling hand. I took a deep breath and unfolded it, feeling Fang's warm exhales against the back of my neck as he read over my shoulder.

 _Maximum_

 _Jefferson Bosse_

Three words. The handwriting was a pressured scribble, but it was Jeb's all the same. Dried blood was spattered in one corner and its creases were distressed, probably from Iggy's nervous fingers fiddling with them.

"Well?" said Iggy.

"It just says 'Jefferson Bosse,'" Fang said in his quiet voice. "And Max's name."

"Jefferson Bosse," I muttered. "I got nothing."

Iggy shook his head. "Me either. Fang?"

Fang grunted a negative and slipped into the living room to grab his laptop, dropping onto the bed and opening it when he returned.

Of all things, an outdated LinkedIn page popped up.

 _Jefferson Bosse,_ it said next to a photo of a middle-aged, upper-class looking man. He wore a navy blue jacket over a pristine white button-up with a striped tie.

 _Dr. Bosse specializes in the fields of both eugenics and the genetics of the animal kingdom, with a specialization in the evolutionary connection between the class of Aves and humans. His dissertation on the subject is widely recognized as the 'bible' of gene recombination, as his work with birds and humans has become the cornerstone of this newly-emergent and ever-changing field._

My blood turned to ice.

Jefferson Bosse.

Bosse.

 _Boss._

And it all clicked.

Mallory calling Jeb a useless pawn. The constant references to "the boss." Charlie's lies and ultimate betrayal in leading us to their safe house, where they'd gathered to hunt me down. Probably to deliver me to their leader.

It hadn't been Jeb calling the shots, or Charlie, or Mallory.

None of them had been in charge at all.

Moments stretched into hours, years. Maybe millennia. My heart was pounding in my chest, adrenaline singing through my bloodstream—how foolish of us, of _me,_ to ever believe this would be over, to continue to think that we'd ousted the top of the villainous food chain, to believe we were safe. I thought of Angel's bracelet and the dainty charm I'd purchased her. _Free._

 _Stupid,_ I thought. _You are so stupid._

I managed to choke out one syllable. "No."

Fang didn't look away from the computer. His hands were balled into fists and his jaw muscle twitched.

Iggy's face blanched. "What?" he demanded. When neither Fang nor I spoke, he repeated, a little more panicked, " _What_?"

"It's not over," I gasped, folding at the waist to stick my head between my legs. Fang dropped a stagnant hand on my back, too worked up himself to do much in the way of comfort. "Oh, my God, it's not over."

Iggy dropped on my other side. "What do you _mean_ , 'it's not over?'"

But I couldn't speak. Fang's first uncurled and his hand started making big circles on my back.

"Remember how we thought we cut the head off the hydra?" he said through his teeth.

"Oh, no," Iggy said, getting it.

Fang quietly read him the LinkedIn page. Iggy swore several times.

I pulled my head from between my legs and met Fang's eyes. For a long time, none of us said anything.

Iggy was the one who broke the silence, looking more miserable than I'd seen him in—weeks. "I'm so sorry," he whispered, looking deeply troubled. "I…" he closed his mouth.

I wanted to tell him it was okay. Because it obviously hadn't made a difference whether I'd known then or now. But it was absolutely not okay, _nothing_ was okay, so what was I supposed to say to him?

We sat in silence for another moment. My entire body felt like lead, weighed down by dread and loathing.

Iggy spoke, his voice wavering with what sounded like unshed tears. "Now what do we do?"

Fang turned to me and dropped a hand to my shoulder. He gave me That Look again, the one that indicated he thought I was liable to either 1) burst into tears, 2) impulsively punch someone, or 3) have a massive dissociative post-traumatic-stress event.

But I did none of those things.

As I saw it, there were two options.

One: return to a life of running. A life of no home, a life of starvation, a life of misery. We had money now, sure, but there was no telling how far it would get us. And in the end, they would find us. They always had before.

The second option was to fight. To find our enemy, to continue to climb the chain of command until we found the true head honcho, be it this Jefferson Bosse or someone entirely different.

The flock needed a leader, needed direction, needed strength. Mallory was gone. Jeb was gone. Eugenics United was gone, resting in a miserable grave alongside the School, the Institute, and Itex. This Jefferson Bosse, in fact, could just be another head to the hydra—but he was hopefully the rest of the body, too.

So I rose to my feet and planted them firmly. I set my shoulders and let my wings unfurl a bit, ruffling out the stiffness in them. I held my head high.

"We do what we always do," I said, and I refused to let my voice tremble.

"We fight."

* * *

A/N: This was the only way this story could end! Don't consider it a cliffhanger… it's more of a reminder that no matter what, the flock will never be able to lead the normal lives they so dearly dream of.

To "Guest" (do I suspect you are Lustrex? Where did _Memory Interrupted_ go? I went to do a nice reread and was DEVASTATED by its absence); fantastic guess regarding the note. You _know_ I couldn't just leave that stone unturned.

To everyone who ever read, reviewed, or gave this story a try—thank you for sticking with me. This has been such a blast, even though it took over a year for me to write. It has been so therapeutic to join this fandom again and to love these characters as I did over ten years ago.

Give me a follow if you like my style! And keep on the lookout for more works by me—I've got an idea or two kicking around, I've just got to get them in order (and maybe half-written) before I go posting anything. I'm thinking my next long piece will take place after School's Out Forever or Saving the World (probably the former, as those first two books are my absolute favorites)—I'm in the process of giving the first three books a reread and the story will be (largely) canon compliant.

Best wishes and love to you all! See you soon.


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